Image by ballardinix from Pixabay Author:@aestranger Reading time: 11 minutes Unlocking the Power of Engagement Connecting with Your Audience for Lasting Impact Back in 2019/2020, GoPro released their Hero8 Black and Max cameras. The Hero8 ended up being one of the most sold models of their cameras ever. And they managed that by engaging with their audience. Instead of making endless advertising videos, GoPro made a few teaser and thriller videos that showcased enough of the Hero8 to let people know it’s out there. What they did then was launch a campaign called ..read more

Photo by 2H Media on Unsplash Author:@aestranger Reading time: 9 minutes The Chief Game Master A New Kind of Consulting Roadmap You’re travelling through an unknown territory and you are met with an obstacle, a challenge that you must overcome. You ask your Chief Game Master (CGM) what the nature of this obstacle and challenge is. They explain to you in moderate detail what it looks like, how it functions and what types of ins and outs it has. You consider this new information and you devise a solution to this obstacle. You offer your CGM the idea that you have ..read more

Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash Author:@aestranger Reading time: 8 minutes The Psychology of Engagement How to Use Biases to Create Content That People Love You’re walking through the city and you see a long line of people queuing around the corner for something. You become interested in why all these people are queuing, so you go and have a look as well. In one instance you may find that you can’t quite see why, but you’re still interested, so you join the queue as well. This is social proof, it’s a bias where you are being socially influenced by other ..read more

Photo by 李仁海 Renhai li on Unsplash Author:@aestranger Reading time: 13 minutes Enhancing Audience Engagement Tackling Pain Points with Precision Imagine you enter a store or come upon a website where you can immediately see why you came there, and that the experience from that point on seamlessly leads you to a variety of things included or extra that interest you. And an experience that incorporated positive pain points so that you felt accomplished and removed negative pain points so that you didn’t feel like you got cheated or given an unwanted surprise. The i ..read more

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash Author:@aestranger Reading time: 15 minutes You're Losing Customers The Power of Providing Solutions It happens too often when a company offers a service, not a solution. Imagine if you will for a moment that you’re uncomfortable with leaving your home, for whatever reason it’s simply better and more calming for you to order things and have them delivered to your home. You’ve seen that a particular item that you could use to help with a problem in your home is finally available for purchase right now. You buy it and the postal delivery service ..read more

Photo by Bianca Fazacas on Unsplash Author:@aestranger Reading time: 11 minutes The Hidden Power of PBLs Adding Purpose and Context for Maximum Impact You’ve signed up for a news service, where you get a daily email of all the best pieces of news from around the country and the world. The next morning you get your first blast, finally, you don’t need to trawl through various feeds, it’s all curated for you. You grab the first article and it’s about the latest scientific discoveries, your favourite topic, you devour this article. And as soon as you finish it and click away, you g ..read more

Photo by Motoki Tonn on Unsplash Author:@aestranger Reading time: 10 minutes The Power of Mastery You wake up early in the morning, for today is the day that you present your ‘masterpiece’ to the gathered guild masters. You can’t remember how long you spent as a novice apprentice under your master, and the time spent as a journeyman has all melded into what can only be described as an age, an epoch of your life in learning. But all of that has led you to this moment, where you can prove your mastery of your craft to all the masters in the guildhall. Each experience ..read more

Photo by Olav Ahrens Røtne on Unsplash Author:@aestranger Reading time: 7 minutes Your audience is smart, let them feel that Ensuring your audience feels understood so that they engage You enjoy feeling smart right? We all like to feel smart, it makes you feel good about yourself, and about what you’ve done so far. That feeling has allowed you to get further than you thought. Feeling dumb isn’t great, you feel a sense of helplessness, embarrassment and probably fear, essentially the fear of the unknown, because you don’t know. We want our audience to feel smart, w ..read more

Photo by János Venczák on Unsplash Author:@aestranger Reading time: 8 minutes Super-mechanics for engaging your audience: Item collection Using the pillar of Gamification in AEX Design One of the aspects or as I call them, pillars, in audience engagement and experience design (AEX) is gamification. One of the tools within gamification is game mechanics, and among them are a few super-mechanics, such as ‘item collection’. I call these super-mechanics because they are so prevalent in not only a lot of games but also within the real world. Just as a side note, for cl ..read more

Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash Author:@aestranger Reading time: 10 minutes Crafting Personas & FABELs from Scratch A reframing of how to segment and target Have you ever struggled with creating a persona for your product, or service business? If you have then you’re not alone. I’ve struggled with it, and it’s especially tough when you’re creating a brand new business and have no data to work from. In this piece I want to explore the concept of crafting these fictional personas, audiences, Tribes or FABELs. But first off, I‘d like to spend a little bit of tim ..read more