Featuring:
John Padgett, Chief Experience and Innovation Officer, Carnival Corporation
Show notes:
Vacations are inherently a personal experience: where people go, the experiences they have, and the memories they make. That very human idea sparked a technology strategy for Carnival Corporation.
The idea of capturing someone’s imagination, sparking emotion, and creating enduring memories through technology may seem paradoxical at first blush, but we’re seeing that relationship forged more and more as customer centricity (or, in the case of Carnival, guest centricity) guides digital platforms and experiences.
While the new technology revolution is indeed a revolution driven by technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented and virtual reality, and the internet of things (IoT), the better way to look at the revolution is through the human (or customer) context.
This new way of looking at the revolution is about to hit the seas. Carnival is launching its Ocean Medallion Class experience in November, connecting every guest to an experiential IoT to provide personalized, frictionless experiences before, during, and after the cruise. Prior to the cruise, guests can define a set of preferences to shape their cruise experience, allowing individual preferences, needs, and wants to be anticipated and delivered during the cruise as well as captured and re-experienced after the journey.
In this episode, John Padgett, Carnival’s chief experience and innovation officer, discusses the experience revolution taking shape for Carnival and its guests — and the internal revolution to rethink its business model. Its core design principle, guest centricity, guided Carnival to reformulate the business model around the guest as opposed to products, services, and experiences. An important aspect of this discussion is moving away from the idea of startups being the innovation leaders. Instead, large corporations getting their heads — as well as their hearts and budgets — around enterprise innovation in order to adapt to rapidly evolving customer expectations and exploit new technology that, when well designed, wraps around the human context.
