The price of sweet crude oil futures is nearing a $100 high-water mark that will inevitably result in social sticker shock, followed by resentment everywhere except among the OPEC nations. Marketers and brand managers of gasoline and other consumer petroleum products will be busier than ever. My best guess: Big Oil's customer-experience sycophants will portray Big Oil, a closed, self-serving global cartel ready and willing to use any means to defend its economic privilege and political power, as "people like us." "We're all in it together!" "Like the rest of us, Big Oil is a victim of circumstances beyond its control." "Big Oil's members are good citizens doing their best to maintain our accustomed lifestyle AND protect the environment." Watching the flood of corporate TV ads, I sense the din's already begun. (But where's the tiger? Where's the Happy Engine?)
Downstream oil companies long ago understood the value of positive and negative “customer experiences.” In the post-WWII America, they joined with the then-Big 3 automakers to promote unbridled driving (“See the USA in a Chevrolet!”) as a positive customer experience. Simultaneously, with help from the automakers and tire manufacturers, they worked hard to make the use of public transit as unpleasant a customer experience as possible -- ultimately, by getting cities to tear out the efficient tramways that once got commuters to work without driving. This dual strategy successfully (a) equated driving a car with personal freedom, turning the phrase, “the open road,” into a kinetic metaphor for the First Amendment; and (b) made transportation policymaking a wholly inter-corporate process (except for the taxes collected by a villainous government to finance necessary infrastructure: the highway, roads, and parking).
Today, however, Big Oil's customer experience people must be working overtime. First, there's the visceral experience we have of crude oil's skyrocketing price, leading to our future experience of rapid, continuous, unprecedented price hikes at the pump. Second, there's the physical experience, conveniently camouflaged by TV ads filmed in scenic national parks, that most time spent in automobiles, in the US, is dead time. (Over on The Oil Drum, the best blog about Peak Oil -- our historical era, in which demand for petroleum exceeds supply -- I read a quote that Americans spend literally billions of hours each year idling at red lights and in traffic jams.) Third, there's our uneasy awareness, fed by scientists and our own environmental experience, that automobiles run on oil account for nearly a fourth (or more) of all CO2 emissions and thus, cataclysmic global warming. Fourth, there's the knowledge, the cognitive experience, that American policy and policymakers, from the President and Congress at the top, down to local traffic planners, are enslaved by the Big Oil/Automobile & Trucking/Highway Construction Establishment -- and that there's no escape in sight. These are pretty negative customer experiences.
Big Oil, to preserve its leading role in our society, is working hard to generate more positive customer experiences. “Empowerment”: pump your own fuel, at your own convenience. (Bonus: it costs less in labor.) “Green”: Standard Oil, a multi-multi-billion-dollar a year global oil enterprise, proudly announces it's generating enough eco-energy to power a city of seven million. (About a third of LA County.) “A Better Future Through Big Oil”: BP is proud of its plan to invest in eco-energy. It's plan. Sometime. Funny, I haven't yet heard anything from Big Oil's customer experience experts about walking or riding a bike, taking public transit, or simply driving less.
Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore in their fascinating new book, Authenticity (which I'll be reviewing here later this week), decry this sort of bleating as “Fake/Fake authenticity” -- in other words, inauthenticity, worse than not saying anything at all. The pitches are false and they're perceived to be false. The problem is, Big Oil doesn't really care. Perhaps its silence would be taken as the most inauthentic thing of all, so used have we become to the oil industry's blaring self-promotion and take-no-prisoners attitude in terms of getting its way.
I thought I might carry out a collective exorcism and call out all those strategic marketers, ethnographic and market research firms, and customer-experience designers who lend their expertise and earn their livelihoods (and a good deal more) from this in-vain effort to turns sows' ears into silk purses. Shame them into renunciation of their wage slavery. (I too once fed at the teat of Big Oil myself, leading a startup whose software products Big Oil coveted. But as I've learned, there's life after Big Oil.) The task proved too immense. It would be a lot easier to list the relatively few professionals who refuse to serve the Petro Beast.
But what's the point? It's just one more customer-experience racket we endure for the sake of denial, like Big Media, the Military Industrial Complex, and The National Exceptionalism Myth. When the oil's gone, it's gone. And that will be the end of it. And us?
(Image: Big Red's Place)
BOB JACOBSON is fascinated by the experience of experience. A planner and technologist, Bob has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning & Design from UCLA. He's been a policy researcher, technology CEO, science writer, and consultant. As a Fulbright Scholar, he studied cellular telephony's impacts on transborder communities in the Nordic Arctic Circle. Bob edited Information Design (MIT Press 2000) and is now writing a book on the theory and practice of creating edifying, transformative experiences.
PAULA THORNTON says, "Understanding human behavior (economics), optimizing interactions (design) and facilitating conversations (markets), are the means to achieve strategic differentiation. This is the focus of our discipline. It is not a 'nice to have'‚ and is not, like documentation once was, an afterthought. It is the means by which to start a strategic discussion and the means by which to drive a tactical initiative. All design should be evidence-based."
