Experience Planner will be a year old in April. That being said, now felt as good a time as any to stop and take a look back at some of the themes and ideas explored over the past year here at Experience Planner.

April 2006
The New Age of Customer Centrcity was the first-ever Experience Planner entry. It highlighted an article written by Rapp Collins’ Chief Planning Officer Cathy Clift called “Account Planning in the New Age of Customer Centricity” in which she thoughtfully outlined how the internet completely blows up our conceptions of purchase funnels for customers and that the planning practice needs to evolve to keep with the times.

I also wrote about Experience Planning as a practice and asked if it was the next frontier for strategic information architecture practioners. I suggested that an experience planner is responsible for 4 areas:

• developing insights about customers and communicating those back to internal/external stakeholders
• creating a framework for innovation to happen at the design level
• ensuring that the voice of the customer is heard throughout the entire process
• providing a framework for experience optimization after a project goes live

I still think that sounds good and that you don’t just have to come from an information architecture background to see yourself in role like an experience planner.

May 2006
Agency 2.0 was all the talk in May at Experience Planner. I said that the successful next-generation agency will act like a broker for their clients’ brands and that planners and t-shaped thinkers would play a big role in shaping those brands, meaning that agencies will need to better understand how to leverage specialized services to deliver messages and experiences to customers.

Later in May, JWT showed signs of embracing Agency 2.0 and hired former Organic Chief Creative Officer Colleen DeCourcy for the role of Chief Experience Officer. I said, Hello Agency 2.0. That may have been pre-mature but Agency 2.0 is a trend and we will see more and more agencies embracing the idea over the next couple of years.

June 2006
In June, I spent some time on customer experience. I proposed some basic elements of customer experience. Building on a Karl Long post about multi-channel customer experience I submitted that the bottom-line for marketers was to not cheat your customers with shallow multi-channel experiences, and for agencies, to not pull the wool over your clients’ eyes by re-purposing content across multiple channels and calling that a multi-channel customer experience strategy.

July 2006
July saw a “beta” Experience Planner Manifesto. It was the first entry I posted that generated a lot of conversation. In the manifesto, I proposed 10 qualities that might define an experience planner.

On another note, and inspired by an idea that Jeneanne Rae talked about at a Design 2.0 event (podcast here), that publicly traded companies who offer great customer experiences out-perform the S&P 500, I cobbled together a stock chart that illustrated the Return on Customer Experience idea. The chart shows, over the course of five years, how companies who have a reputation for building great customer experiences did in fact out-perform the S&P 500.

This past November, the good people at Teehan+Lax put their money where their mouth is and created a User Experience Fund. The UX Fund will mature this November. While the fund is up over 3% since inception (it was higher in December ‘06), it’s currently under-performing when compared to major indicies (mostly due to a bearish Netflix stock). We’ll see how things look in November ‘07.

August 2006
Return on customer experience rears it head again in August. Starbucks stock had been taking a beating for three months at that point. I suggested that Starbucks stock was down due to a declining focus on customer experience. The culprit: long lines. As a side note, Starbucks stock is still under-performing.

Also from August, check out Experience Planner’s Top 10 Recommended Reads.

September 2006
September was a light month at Experience Planner. It was mostly a link-love month. Dan Brown took a Critical Look at Usability Approaches. A sweet Audi R8 microsite launched and getting off-topic, I said There Is Hope when Richard Branson announced that he will commit $3 billion over the next decade to combat global warming. That post generates a ton of traffic for me because of trackback link to the Climate Project.

On a related note, if you haven’t seen An Inconvenient Truth, go rent it this weekend. Not only is it a persuasive argument outlining the devasting effect that humans have had on the environment over the past century, it is one of the best examples of public speaking.

October 2006
In October I took a look at the Planning Process and created a diagram to illustrate it. In October, I was also impressed by Crispin Porter + Bogusky and that they continue to just “get it“. CP+B CEO Jeff Hicks said:

“We think the future of advertising is great products that have marketing embedded in them”

I added that the future of advertising is also great products that have great customer experiences embedded in them.

November 2006
November was a tipping point month for Experience Planner. In November I posted a series of definitive entries more frequently than in any other month. In November I saw Experience Planner’s unique readership on the site nearly triple in size and saw RSS subscriptions double.

Brand was on my mind all month in November. The post that really sent things through the roof was Wii: A New Value Curve for Nintendo. In it, I suggested that Nintendo was trying to carve out uncontested marketspace with the Wii in order to avoid competing themselves to death with Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s XBox 360. A lot folks came out of the woodwork to comment on that entry! Here’s a graphic I put together to illustrate the point:

I also took a look at Harley’s Deep-Soul Connection with their customers. The deep-soul connection is the highest-level relationship a brand can have with its consumer and that it transcends the brand’s own products and services as well as those of their competitors.

Lastly, I chimed in on the information architecture is dead debate by suggesting that information architecture is not dead but the conversation amongst practioners might be stuck and that there was a strong need to look voices of inspiration outside of the information architecture.

December 2006
December was a light month at Experience Planner. I went on vacation to South East Asia for a few weeks and maintained a separate blog with my travel companions.

2007!
What does 2007 hold in store for Experience Planner? I’m excited about a number of topics right now including the nature of inspiration, emerging mobile marketing practices, and the widgetization of the web. Of course, planning, brand and creativity will remain as themes as I look at new topics, but I’ll aim to intersect them with the core ideas explored here.

Thanks to everyone who has read Experience Planner, left comments, or dropped me lines via email over the past year. You help me stay inspired and motivated!