These days all the really cool brands are about engineering "customer
experience." When blue-chip IBM decided it wanted its clients to have
one, it went to Hollywood to find out how it's done. But Hollywood's best
experience enhancers still weren't doing anything for the business realm.
"Even the Disney folks hadn't made that leap," recalls Howard
Fields, IBM's director of strategy and market development for e-business
integration. Then IBM sat down with Imaginary Forces, a firm made famous
by its title sequence for the movie Seven. "They got
it," Fields says.
IBM's new Centers for E-Business Innovation weren't meant to be another
branding theme park but places where the company's biggest clients would
come to work with a whole team of IBM's e-business talent. Admittedly, Imaginary
Forces had never engineered a 3-D experience before, though managing partner
Chip Houghton explains that it's not all that different from designing titles:
you create an environment that will focus the audience on the main event.
IBM wanted a space that would help engage clients in plotting great experiences
for their own customers--from the Web site to all the systems, hard and
soft, that make it work. "We didn't just want to slap up some video
on the wall," Houghton says. Just as the firm would bring in a
director of cinematography when working on movie titles, Imaginary Forces
pulled together a team that included architecture firm Design Office
and sound designers Musikvernuegen and set out to tackle a real all-media
project.
Eventually there will be 25 IBM Centers for E-Business Innovation around
the world, all echoing elements of the first center (which opened in
Chicago in December). Housed in a Mies van der Rohe building, the prototype
center has wide-span windows that are mirrored in the lit screens of video
and slide projections, interactive kiosks, and a magic invisible-technology
conference table designed to allow the person behind the podium to sit down
with everyone else. (Each person works at desktop applications projected
onto an ordinary-looking tabletop.) The space is more than the sum of its
technical marvels, however. Everything in it--from the walls that pivot
at the press of the fingers to the luminous fioor made of crushed
Heineken and Skyy Vodka bottles suspended in a clouded epoxy--says "endless
possibility," according to IBM's Nancy Rowe. Houghton thinks clients
will say, "Wow, IBM totally gets it."
