Situated Action Theory and experiences

The total experiential agenda could involve from brand enhancement to internal communication, an enormous spectrum to spam. But which are the key elements to focus on, when designing a final customer experience to deliver?
We will focus on the economic entity that experiences are and the way they are delivered. Methods of pricing are, without any doubt, an important issue, but to be considered separately: the characteristic commonality of our interest will be the way in which experiences are created.[1]

Although the importance of an interdisciplinary approach is marked, our approach starts from service management literature (Marketing and Operations Management).
We stand our construction on the Situated Action Theory[2], which offers a reference for understanding how experiential services are shaped.

This theory basically considers that “cognition” (process of constructing knowledge) and “context“(physical, social and cultural background) generate and transform each other, within a dialectical relationship. Based on these premises, a third element, “practice” (also called “action”) captures the interrelationship between context and cognition and allows us to observe the experience configuration.

An experience involves learning while customers interact with different elements of the service provider’s design. This dialectic relation between cognition and context is the core of a unique and memorable experience. But the central theoretical concept of the theory is that of practices of people acting in a setting, because it captures the inter-relationship of context and cognition. Moreover, it is by observing practices the way to understand how experiences are constructed in the process of cognitive and non-cognitive activities. Observing people interacting is also a way to recognize how knowledge and preferences are shaped within social interactions.

As a result, there is a transformation of both the context and the user. Due to this dialectical (and interactive) process, repeated interactions enrich the experience both for context and users. [1]
Traditionally, customers were assumed to have a fixed set of preferences and expectations regardless of the context, and the providers tried to meet those preferences with specific attributes in a product or a service. However, there is a dynamic relationship between context and cognitive activities, in which they mutually influence each other. As a consequence, customer’s preferences are not static but dynamic and shaped in the context. The objective of the service provider is to shape customer’s preferences actively by designing a setting in which the meaning of the experience is created in a favorable way. The central tenet is that cognition and context are mutually constitutive.
This framework can be useful to provide a guide to understand what firms can observe, modify and inform in order to design and offer new experience intensive services, or to mange the existent ones.
[1] Gupta and Vajic, 2000.
[1] Gupta and Vajic, 2000.
[2] Lave and Wenger, 1991; Schuman, 1987.