Air Canada hospitality

If your product or service's customer journey takes you through urban environments, then it is inevitably an urban journey, and mapping it begins at the customer's front door. While it seems that your brand should shoulder no responsibility for traffic, weather, parking, or current real-time conditions of a specific location, the reality is that your journey management platforms should be aware of all externalities that affect the total journey.

Air Canada offers a resource-rich timeline that goes beyond the essentials of your flight (table stakes). They offer additional resources and information that go beyond what’s nominally required of an airline. In the example below, 45% of the content could be considered “over and above” what one would expect from basic airline flight information. A signature moment is the cherry on top—a unique brand interaction that offers surprise and delight.

So why do brands bother to include information or content that’s not directly related to the task at hand? Because the human "experiencing self" of that journey—the collective personal accounts—will affect the “remembering self,” as psychologist Daniel Kahneman has observed. We subconsciously assign those good and bad remembrances, fair or unfair, onto the brand or service. Those memories ultimately may end up as a Net Promoter Score—a key KPI that most service-based organizations are graded on.