Dead Ends: Luxury

Welcome to Dead Ends, a monthly or sort of monthly podcast about how the world around us is designed and how it got that way, and mostly in. Isn't that interesting? I'm one half of your host lay down.

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Speaker 2

And I'm the other half, Sarah Drummond. And this is the Dead End podcast from the School of Good Services, and we hope you enjoy the show. I like what you did there.

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Lou

Yeah, well, it was supposed to be monthly. And like most things where you promise that you're going to do something. it doesn't happen.

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Speaker 2

I don't I think we had a good track record, but actually we both basically lost our voices and got quite sick independently on different podcast months.

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Lou

Yeah. Yeah. We've had, we've had this sort of plagues, our house, various different cities. We've also had builders. So, Yeah. Who are here at the moment. So let's see if you hear any sort of weird coughs or sanding noises. let us know.

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Speaker 2

So what are we talking about this week or this month or this year or whatever track record we're.

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Lou

Yeah. Well, whatever month we're on. so this this week we are going to talk about luxury. And I guess it's a bit of a follow on from, last podcast, which was about austerity. And this is kind of the the sort of flip side of that coin. But the reason why we're talking about it is the, well, on my script it says last weekend we were traveling this was a while ago, but anyway, we were traveling and we stayed at a, large resort hotel, which shall remain nameless.

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Lou

I don't want to shame this particular resort hotel, but it's not usually the kind of place where we would stay. and we didn't realize basically, long story short, that this was a very large resort hotel. We thought it was a very cute, very demure, country manor. hotel. but when we arrived, we basically realized it was connected to a massive megalith of a brutalist core golf resort, which wasn't exactly what we had in mind.

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Lou

and there were definitely some learnings. So basically, breakfast had to be booked. parking was a ten minute walk that you also had to pay for.

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Speaker 2

You had to pay for it. I was so pissed off.

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Lou

Yet, considering the only way of getting to this hotel was via a motorway, I think that's a little bit of a cheek.

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Speaker 2

I won't say which country it was, Ed, because then it would totally give it away.

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Lou

Yeah, right. Okay. Anyway, large golf resort near a motorway. in a country that shall remain nameless. and, yeah, you had to book the pool. You had to basically navigate about a billion different email reminders to download various different apps to do what should have been pretty basic, straightforward things within a hotel. And I think probably a lot of people will be able to resonate with this experience of a kind of faux luxury where something that you thought was going to be a really lovely experience basically turns out to be something quite different, and quite restrictive and very rule based and just somehow doesn't feel luxurious.

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Lou

And it's hard to put your finger on exactly why that is. And anyway, that got us thinking about why was that experience not luxurious and what actually is luxury. So that's why we wanted to to kind of follow on our austerity episode with this sort of counterfactual about luxury and what luxury looks like and how it gets categorized and services and what we mean by luxury in the context of service design.

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Speaker 2

Well, as Sarah does with one's podcast, there goes type T, type T, what's the etymology of this word and where has it come from and what does it mean? And so I started looking back at actually the origins of the word luxury, because I just think that's a nice place to start is to get a kind of, either common or contrasting understanding of, of people's understanding of that word.

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Speaker 2

Right. So I went back and looked at tracing the word back to the Latin word, luxuria, meaning extravagance or excess. The ancient Romans used the term luxuria to describe rebellious, living and sinful excess. Very sinful times. In the Roman times, how often do we think about the Roman era? Who?

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Lou

Well, I don't think about the Romans very often.

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Speaker 2

I've said, wait, the Romans? And twice now. I'm very proud of it.

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Lou

But you do. You really do think about the Roman Empire quite regularly.

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Speaker 2

Literally by the Roman Empire. So when actually luxury evolved from Latin to Norman French, the Norman word luxuria conveyed the meaning of lust. Later, in the word luxury permeated into English and French had a sexual meaning or connotation, and it was first recorded in such terms as early as 1340. Nevertheless, the word's association with indulgence, wealth, and opulence only appear in English texts in the early 17th century, so the modern understanding of the word luxury is actually closer to the original Latin, meaning back to an idea of extravagance and excess reinterpreted to lose its kind of previous, I guess, negative connotations.

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Speaker 2

And I think that's kind of interesting, actually, when you look at luxury over time, we inherently look at the evolution of society and its kind of perspective and framing of the world. So the different shapes of what we mean by luxury and the language of it have changed over time. So it's gone from being, at one point, the kind of upper echelons of a society and high price goods.

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Speaker 2

you know, in Roman times, the you're looking at me like, why are you talking about the Romans again?

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Lou

Always with the Romans, when.

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Speaker 2

The color purple was actually only to be worn by a certain upper echelon of society? so it was quite a luxurious color and material anyway, to then sinful and bad. So actually, the idea to live in luxury was to live in sin, to a disparity in society. So I think, like kind of Monaco, Monaco, Monaco, Monaco, Monaco.

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Lou

Monaco.

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Speaker 2

Monarchy, the monarchy where monocles.

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Lou

Are made on some point. I'm sure that they have not now, probably, but I.

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Speaker 2

Don't know if I'll actually cut this but to a disparity in society. So think kind of monarchy times. when I say monarchy times, how many times? Like now we do live in monarchy down to then luxury really kind of being to seeing a renaissance of seeing good enjoy in life, selling, enjoying luxurious, luxurious times to then the offering up of wealth.

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Speaker 2

And as we see the development of people having more capital and more expended expenditure really in their income, being able to afford and access elements of luxury. But I think that last sort of point is what we're going to go into talk about is what really is luxury and can we really, truly, as Joe Bloggs every day? And I'm being quite sort of, broaden that term of Joe Bloggs.

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Speaker 2

We should do a podcast, where the term Joe Bloggs comes from, it's sort of like the archetypal persona of like, well, let's design it for Joe Bloggs. Who is Joe? Yeah. Good point. Is Joe Bloggs.

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Lou

Yeah. Because it's you would have thought that it would be more obvious to use something like Joe Smith or John Smith or like Bloggs is quite a specific.

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Speaker 2

But it's also just like a very, like just a very male term like Joe's. We'd say like the archetypal.

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Lou

It's just well, I mean, it's like a typo to to a British term. Right? Because Smith is a very common surname, but it would be very different in different countries, right? Yeah.

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Speaker 2

I feel quite like that. I'm just commonly using the term Joe Bloggs is like your archetype or like Everyday Joe.

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Lou

Okay, we'll Google this. Folks will come back to you at the end of the episode.

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Speaker 2

Do you think it's unfortunate if your name is actually Joe Blog?

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Lou

I think it's very unfortunate. Yeah, a bit like being called John Doe. I think that would be a very bad thing.

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Speaker 2

To put away your average person of your average wealth. but I think that's a really important question. We might sort of like traipse through in this, this podcast today about luxury is what really is luxury.

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Lou

So ideas of luxury being tied to monetary value is something that's been kind of going on for as long as luxury has really been around. And actually, this kind of connection between monetary value and who has access to that money and who can have access to luxury are really intrinsically linked from our first definitions of what luxury actually is.

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Lou

and it really goes hand in hand with the class system. So think first class economy class, business class on flights. That has been going on for a really long time. And actually, some of the first laws to exist were sumptuary laws, and those were laws that basically dictated who had access to luxury. So who could wear certain types of clothes or get access to certain types of luxurious foods according to their social class?

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Lou

And the first law in ancient Greece around the seventh century BC was a cemetery law. And I'm going to read this some tree law because I think it's, particularly, excellently worded. So a freeborn woman may not be accompanied by more than one female slave unless she is drunk. She may not leave the city during the night unless she is planning to commit adultery.

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Lou

She may not wear gold jewelry or a garment with purple border unless she is a courtesan, and the husband may not wear a gold studded ring or a cloak of Melanesian fashion unless he is bent upon prostitution or adultery. And I kind of love the fact that basically you can get away with whatever you like as long as you have, sort of someone nefarious intent, you know, so you can wear what you like is basically you are bent on prostitution.

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Lou

You can go outside of the city walls wearing whatever the hell you like, as long as you're drunk. and I don't think is any coincidence. Also that, the beginning part of this paragraph is to do with controlling, women's access to luxury as well. So I think there's a lot going on there. But anyway, in England in the Middle Ages, sumptuary laws that also dictated, how people could access different types of luxury.

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Lou

And this idea that kind of started in, kind of ancient Greece, basically continued, throughout history and in England, you couldn't get access to furs, fabrics, trims, of certain colors of certain fabrics and types. If you were of a lower social class. And I am doing some very extreme er quoting, whilst I'm doing that.

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Lou

So the reason for this was basically to reduce spending on foreign textiles in the Middle Ages in England, which I think is quite interesting. So there was this idea of basically shaming people for accessing luxury because we wanted to basically control trade. so there's loads of different forces pulling on luxury here. And I'm going to read another quote to you because I think this is quite interesting.

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Lou

And this is from England in the Middle Ages, the excess of apparel and the superfluity of unnecessary foreign wares now of late years, is grown by such sufferance to such an extremity, that the manifest decay of the whole realm generally is like to follow, by bringing into the realm such superfluity as cloths of gold, silver, and most vain devices of so great cost, but also particularly the wasting and undoing of a great number of young gentlemen, seeking by show of apparel, to be esteemed as gentlemen who allured by the vain show of such things, do not only consume themselves, their goods and their lands, which their parents left under them, but also run into such

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Lou

debts and ships that they cannot live out of danger without attempting unlawful acts whereby they are not any serviceable to their country, as otherwise they might be. So basically, not only wearing silks mean that you are not useful as a worker, because basically you're loafing around wearing your silk PJs or whatever. But also you're going to get into debt, buying them and criminality in the process.

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Lou

And oh, by the way, not only are you giving money to potentially France in the process, but you know, you're also not going to be serviceable to your country because presumably you've spent so much time loafing around in your cell PJs that you're not very good at fighting anymore. So basically, just don't do it. so luxury has always gone hand in hand with control of who has access to luxury, kind of since the dawn of time.

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Lou

And I think that's something really interesting that carries forward, to today actually.

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Speaker 2

Yeah. And I think there's something about exclusivity and access and how regularly you experience that, that we have to bring into this conversation as well when it comes to luxury. And what's interesting is that there's I guess this idea of the luxury experience isn't the same for everyone or I guess, like a binary equation of something either being luxury or basic.

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Speaker 2

It's a continuum. And I found this, article in the Journal of Service Management about luxury services from 2020 by Joe Shen, works of the National University of Singapore. Jones Home Quest I really hope I've pronounced his name rights from the KGI Business School in Bordeaux. I'm Martin Paul Fritz from the University of Cologne, and they talk about luxury as this idea of a continuum.

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Speaker 2

And they say luxury services are not categorical, rather that there is a continuum ranging from ordinary services to elite luxury services based on the degree of extra ordinariness and exclusivity. And they have this diagram called the luxury ordinary service continuum. I love that I feel like it's some kind of like to know that weird thing you might find in a film.

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Speaker 2

I don't find the luxury ordinary service continuum. Basically, it uses two axes, so one is the degree of exclusivity and extra ordinariness, which spans from low to high in luxury characteristics. And the other level of luxury, which they categorize into ordinary non luxury services everyday luxury, standard luxury and elite luxury. So to kind of like pull that apart a bit.

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Speaker 2

If we were to take like the world of coffee and dining, everyday luxury might mean a Starbucks standard, luxury might mean casual fine dining and elite luxury might mean three star Michelin dining. Or maybe even like a private chef coming to your home who's, like, super famous for a master chef or whatever. or in the domestic service space we might see everyday luxury might mean having a cleaner standard.

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Speaker 2

Luxury might mean a private housekeeper. Elite luxury might mean a private butler. So the way of thinking about it is, these sort of ideas of prestige, monetary exclusivity. So the affordability, to the unattainable for most. How much can you afford that experience? Social exclusivity, hadronic exclusivity and extraordinary experience. So I guess, like looking at this continuum, there's a sense of exclusivity in what it means to experience luxury.

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Speaker 2

But I'm sure that's not the only way in which we can think about carving this up. Right.

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Lou

Yeah. I think what's really interesting about what you just said is the obviously the definition of what falls into those different categories is extremely subjective, right? So I'm sure to a lot of people, having a cleaner would not be standard luxury. You know, that there will be people who think that that is a basic necessity, and there will be people who think that that is far beyond their world experience.

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Lou

So I think there's a there's a real massive scoop of salt that goes with the definition of this continuum that is very much in the eye of the beholder.

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Speaker 2

Well, 100%. And just jump in there like, I think there is a line which I haven't written down, but it says something like, we can't possibly define what luxury means in the context of services. So I'm like, okay, thank you.

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Lou

Okay. You've reached a dead end far too soon. Let me bring you back to this great story. because I think there's something really interesting here where it's really easy to get hung up on the idea that for something to be luxurious, it absolutely has to be exclusive, that there has to be a very small number of people that can get access to that thing.

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Lou

And actually, there are other definitions of how we think about luxury if we expand our view of it. So I think this does turn up in services quite a bit, where this idea of luxury is really tied to exclusivity. Right. So you have things that are, VIP or special access. and there's a lot of things about limiting the numbers of, of people being able to access that, that luxury.

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Lou

Therefore it becomes luxurious. And this may be where we were kind of driving out with the the kind of experience that we had of this unnamed golf hotel. Right. So the pictures made it look like a small boutique, exclusive kind of place that was quite small. And actually it was enormous. So perhaps, maybe our experience of it being not luxurious was the fact that it was so vast and so huge and so anonymous feeling, actually.

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Lou

But if we look at the other elements of luxury, it's not just about exclusivity. And if we were to sort of forensically distill elements of, you know, luxury cars, hotels and other areas of life, we might start to see other elements of luxury coming through. Which brings me to a story of when we had, electrics done in our house, and I was having a conversation with our electrician about putting in motion sensing lights.

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Lou

And his response was basically, that will probably make the house feel a little bit like a school or a company building. And I thought that was quite interesting, because it hadn't actually occurred to me that that would be the case. and it sort of got me thinking about what a sort of lack of control and a lack of flexibility does to our perception of a space and also a surface.

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Lou

So to him, I think his thought was basically, well, if you don't get the opportunity to turn the light on and off yourself, it's probably because someone else is controlling your electric bills, and they want to make sure that they're like and obviously in your house, you pay for the electric bills so you can have the luxury of turning on your lights and turning them off whenever you like.

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Lou

And that kind of wasn't really how I saw it. I saw it was just convenient. you know, I'm walking around with a plate of food and I don't really want to turn the lights on and off, but I think that's a really interesting idea there, actually, that we can apply to services, which is that we often see things where we're in control, where we have the flexibility and the trust of a service provider to do something ourselves as luxurious.

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Lou

And we can kind of see this turning up in things like honesty bars. You know, if you go to a really luxurious hotel, often there'll be an honesty bar where you have control of how much you know, you serve yourself. or, you know, being able to check in or check out at different points in time from a hotel or, you know, you've got the flexibility there to have late checkout, for example.

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Lou

So I think there's a really interesting idea there around flexibility and trust and control showing up in services. And it's something that actually we see in services that are often designed for the super, super, super wealthy. and those services almost have no rules at all. So, you know, if you are part of the 0.001% and you have your professional fixer or, you know, system, that person can be doing it, doing anything from getting you Scottish smoked salmon at 5 a.m. in Singapore to finding a diamond ring that you lost in Paris last week, or booking you into a hotel.

00:20:07:05 - 00:20:36:17

Lou

You know, in six months time, there's almost anything that you can ask that person to do. And, you know, that's extreme flexibility. It's extreme control, really. so I think there's something quite interesting there. But that's not the only thing that we see showing up in services. So I wanted to just kind of run through some other patterns of luxury that we start to see showing up actually in services when we sort of forensically distill them in this kind of way.

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Lou

So the first one is time. And time is kind of interesting because often we see time showing up in luxurious experiences in the sense that basically you pay to spend less time doing something, so, you know, pay to skip the queue or speedy boarding or reserving a place in advance. So time is a big part of this.

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Lou

The next one is probably less common now. The maybe tastes have changed, but there is also this idea of kind of large amounts of labor involved in that service, making it luxurious. So, you know, in sort of physical products, I guess you could see this in something that's been aged, you know, aged Saki, aged wine, something. It's been handmade, you know, building with loads of amount of ornamentation, that type of thing.

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Lou

And like I said, you know, tastes have changed to perhaps, maybe things that are a little bit more, straightforward, a bit more minimal these days. But I think there is also an element of this that shows up in services where, you know, we we see the huge amount of labor that's involved in a luxury meal that we get from a, you know, five star restaurant, for example.

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Lou

Closely related to this is a sort of luxury sense of unnamable origin or provenance of the thing that we're accessing. And again, we see this showing up in food a lot. Obviously, things like, you know, whiskey, being very much about where it's from, cheese, meats, those sorts of things. But we also see it in other products as well, you know, Swiss made watches, for example.

00:22:15:09 - 00:22:40:12

Lou

and there's definitely an element of this that shows through in services as well. So name of origin of provenance is a really kind of another big pattern in service design and luxury. Another one is also removal of labor. And this is where basically you pay for someone to do something for you. You know, you basically outsource the labor that you would be spending in a service to someone else.

00:22:40:12 - 00:22:47:12

Lou

So, you know, if you were a luxury hotel, you might be given a little bell to ring by the pool to get someone to give you a drink, that kind of thing.

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Speaker 2

Have you ever had a little bell?

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Lou

Do you know wool? Actually, yes. Not a little bell, but a buzzer. I have been to a hotel where I was handed a buzzer. if you were there, do you. Maybe we had too many margaritas.

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Speaker 2

Oh, that's how we do a drink anymore.

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Lou

Exactly.

00:23:03:16 - 00:23:07:23

Speaker 2

Give us the buzzer. We'll get the margaritas. Yeah. And luxurious.

00:23:07:23 - 00:23:12:06

Lou

Yeah. It was very luxurious at the time, but, there's a reason why you don't remember it.

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Speaker 2

Where was that so luxurious? Oh, yeah. What can you possibly tell you?

00:23:16:05 - 00:23:35:09

Lou

It was in Brazil. I think it was Italian. hi. It's new here. Time for show ad break. When we're not podcasting, we run the school, look at services. That helps people and organizations learn how to design and deliver great services. We teach courses on service design, how to get by and for your work, and what makes a good and a bad service.

00:23:35:11 - 00:23:58:09

Lou

So if you want to know more about that and to sign up to one of our courses, check out Good Services. The next one is personalization. And this is a really big one that you know, probably will make most of us cringe slightly. came up a lot in the early 2000s as we were talking about personalizing absolutely every element of a digital experience for people.

00:23:58:11 - 00:24:31:17

Lou

you know, the home page, your account, everything was about making something personal for that person. and to be honest, I think it's kind of interesting the it's now really the absolute fundamental basic of most digital services is that that service remembers you to some extent. You know, it would be pretty weird if you turned up to a banking service and that bank didn't remember who you were, or in a service where you were paying for something that you had to keep adding in your card details or your home address, those sorts of things.

00:24:31:17 - 00:24:53:20

Lou

So, well, what sort of started, I think is quite a luxury in terms of digital experience. This is now really the sort of fundamental basic, I think. So I think what's really interesting about these things is that actually most of them don't really have anything to do with the utility necessarily of the service. Most of them are to do with your perception or your experience of that service.

00:24:53:20 - 00:25:10:09

Lou

So, you know, for example, if you're taking a train, the train takes the same amount of time to get to its destination, regardless of whether or not you're in first class or you're in a standard class carriage, a lot of these things are the same. It's just your perception that is different, essentially.

00:25:10:15 - 00:25:46:07

Speaker 2

Yeah. And I think what's interesting is actually just looking back at where we started to consider that actually designing experiences was a thing that needed to be designed that could become, again, some kind of, as you said, added value on top of the utility or the products, even the thing that helps us do something right. And if we go back to, you know, the works of the likes of Alvin Toffler in the 1970s, who was quite famous futurist, he included a chapter in his pretty famous book called Future Shock titled The Experience Makers, where he asked, where does the economy go next?

00:25:46:09 - 00:26:09:15

Speaker 2

After the services were and kind of answered it with articulating the growth of what we call, well, what he called as a strange new sector based on what can only be called the experience industries. And it's kind of wild right to think, because that's, that's what, about 55 years ago now that he was sort of thinking about the premise of this, it feels so common to actually think about experiences being designed for us.

00:26:09:15 - 00:26:30:15

Speaker 2

And they're designed in, in such tight coupling that particularly, I think if you work in any industry that is involved in designing or delivering experiences, like you've just done, you like listing out the kind of patterns that you've seen in it. You start to actually get a sense of full luxury quite quickly, because you can see it's really being like, it's like a bit of a, I don't know why I'm going for this metaphor.

00:26:30:15 - 00:26:57:14

Speaker 2

A sausage machine, like squeezing through an experience. Does that sausage a luxury sausage of experience? Oh, dear God, we've gone off script again. But we can really call this stuff out. So, you know, Toffler was really starting to say we're going to be looking at designing experiences. And just at this point before I go on, because I'm just very careful to make sure everyone gets credit, in things that been published in writing, it wasn't just Alvin Toffler that wrote a lot of the content.

00:26:57:14 - 00:27:40:04

Speaker 2

Like Future Shock. His wife, Heidi Toffler, also contributed heavily. So shout out to Heidi as well. And so this term of, you know, the experience, economy and experience design has taken shape again over the last 50 years, very common to us now. But the term experience economy, we think, was first used in a 1988 article by Joseph Pyne and James Gilmore, who were describing the next economy following things like the agrarian economy, which is really where we think about agricultural society, where a community whose economy is based on producing and maintaining crops and farmland, moving to a kind of industrial economy, moving to a service economy and then becoming what we call the experience economy.

00:27:40:04 - 00:28:10:06

Speaker 2

So I think Toffler was sort of, a bit like the, the, you know, the age old Nostradamus dude who used to predict the future. That's what Toffler was doing, but in a kind of, like, less crystal ball sort of way and more in a kind of strategic sort of way. Anyway, I digress, but I think what's really interesting is this idea of a next dimension of progressive economic value from extracted commodities to the making of goods, to the delivery of services to the staging of experiences.

00:28:10:06 - 00:28:40:23

Speaker 2

So we can start to look at that tie really between experience design and the experience economy was ultimately, let's be honest, making more money. Right. So doing the same thing but putting an added value on top. And they really depicted the experience economy as a sale of memorable experiences to customers. Now, I think what's really important when we kind of cite one, set of writers and book is to is to go, where are they the first or have we heard about this in other different species before?

00:28:41:01 - 00:29:13:00

Speaker 2

So in the early 1980s, Maurice Holbrook and Elizabeth Hirschman had a paper called The Experience Show Aspects of Consumption, Consumer fantasies, feelings and fun, which sounds like a really fun actually article. But what they were starting to do in the early 1980s was look at the recognition of experiential aspects of consumption. So again, deriving sort of added value and economic value from adding and consciously delivering experiences to people has been something that's evolved over the last 56 years, in 1992.

00:29:13:00 - 00:29:40:09

Speaker 2

And I find this kind of really fascinating, actually. German sociologist Gerard Schultz researched inhabitants of the city of Nuremberg and observed a new way of living where basic needs recovered and people merely were striving for a nice living, which is Seans leben experiencing life early in. And Schultz summarized his findings of this sort of discovery using the words experience society in his book Die Arab in Gallus Shaft.

00:29:40:11 - 00:29:45:01

Speaker 2

Stop it! Don't laugh at my German pronunciation. Do you want to try pronouncing it better?

00:29:45:01 - 00:29:50:00

Lou

All right, let's go for it. d no, no.

00:29:50:02 - 00:30:09:04

Speaker 2

You don't know. There you go. But the English translation of it. And I really apologize to all my wonderful, beautiful German friends and German speaking, friends. it was called the Experience Society in 1995. And I just think what's really interesting is thinking about this thing that goes over and above, you know, having just a nice living.

00:30:09:04 - 00:30:32:18

Speaker 2

So in the experience society, people behave differently as consumers. A transformation finds place from the need for goods that are generally useful or functional to a need for goods that deliver an individual experience and demand and offerings for these experienced me at what's called the experience market, which is our our Lebanon's market. I am so sorry. German listeners.

00:30:32:20 - 00:31:00:07

Speaker 2

so this idea of this kind of additional experience is being designed and on offer that people could then pay more for has been around actually for, for a really long time. And people did critique pining go go more as thesis on the experience economy. It was criticized as an example of an overhyped business philosophy that emerged from the.com bubble during a period in which a rising US economy was tolerant of high prices and inflated claims, and imposed no limitations really, on supplier investment.

00:31:00:13 - 00:31:21:18

Speaker 2

And their thesis has also been criticized from within the fields of tourism, leisure and hospitality management studies, wherein there's already quite well-established theories on the role of experiences in the economy. That kind of went a little bit. We could see unacknowledged by pain. And Gilmore but, you know, I start thinking a lot about this. And when you start reading about experience economy, there's nods to different case studies and examples.

00:31:21:18 - 00:31:43:04

Speaker 2

And one of the ones I was reading about was in the travel business, where the former British Airways chairman, Sir Colin Marshall, noted that the and I'm er bracketing commodity mindset is to quote, think that a business is merely performing a function in our case, transporting people from point A to point B on time and at the lowest possible price.

00:31:43:06 - 00:32:02:11

Speaker 2

But what they seek to do with British Airways, according to Sir Colin, is to go beyond the function and compete on the basis of providing an experience. So he sort of nods in the kind of business world is that companies should think about what they would do differently if they charged admission, or they charge for something that they deliver.

00:32:02:13 - 00:32:25:05

Speaker 2

And I just think it's like, really quite interesting when you start to peel back the layers of the kind of economic concern within luxury services and experiences we've had, you know, for quite a long time, a division of experiences of, you know, luxury service on sale to customers or a slightly sort of premium model. And you know, what happens when we design this kind of luxury?

00:32:25:10 - 00:32:32:00

Speaker 2

We over design these experiences into our everyday services. Is it actually luxurious?

00:32:32:02 - 00:33:03:02

Lou

Yeah. And I think I'm probably voicing, maybe the collective groans of everyone listening to this podcast. When you hear the idea of the experience economy, what sort of comes to mind is, is basically kind of vaporware, I think, where essentially a company is trying to sell you value added things that may or may not actually be added value with the guys, but it it's a much more luxurious experience that you're having.

00:33:03:02 - 00:33:28:12

Lou

And I think that's kind of where we come back to the experience that was not so luxurious of the luxury hotel that we went to, where, you know, it offered a Roman spa, but you had to book it. it had parking, but you had to pay for the parking. It had a concierge, but basically that person was there to tell you what not to do and where to go and how to book your breakfast, not to actually help you to do anything.

00:33:28:14 - 00:33:52:04

Lou

So it had all of the hallmarks of luxury, but it didn't trust you. And I think that's what's really interesting here is that you can't really fake luxury, you know, if something is luxurious along, just sort of one axis, I it's exclusive, but it's not flexible or it's offering one aspect of luxury, but it's super restrictive. It in another way.

00:33:52:06 - 00:34:21:14

Lou

It's not luxurious. And actually this is kind of what most of us, I think, experience as this kind of in very much air quotes version of luxury experiences where we're being sold something that is supposed to be a premium experience but actually is incredibly restrictive. And often this comes in the form of a company basically trying to sell you something on the basis of an experience where you actually just want the utility of the thing.

00:34:21:16 - 00:34:47:11

Lou

So think about your average broadband provider who is constantly trying to upgrade you to more luxurious, faster packages that will save you time but can't send you an accurate bill on time. And I think this is really interesting, actually, about this kind of balance between utility and luxury, where you absolutely cannot sell luxury if you are not fulfilling the utility of a service.

00:34:47:13 - 00:35:00:16

Lou

And actually, if we look at the things that we really value about our services and and the experience that we have of them, those things are often not expensive. so why don't we see them everywhere, is the question.

00:35:00:17 - 00:35:31:16

Speaker 2

So I think what we're starting to kind of like little luxury vultures circle around in terms of getting towards a dead end, is looking at some of the principles of actually what makes a service or an experience luxurious that we might value the most. So it's not necessarily the shiniest thing or the most full luxury thing, but actually, you know, the patterns that you were spotting around flexibility, trust, or just things working really well, doing it faster or quicker for us.

00:35:31:18 - 00:35:59:08

Speaker 2

And these sort of principles are patterns aren't actually things that might mean are services more expensive to provide. Which kind of leads me to dwell and think about what if we took those ideas of what luxury could mean and services and apply them to services we might not deem as being ever luxurious? So things like social care services or government services or services that we user experience in the public realm.

00:35:59:08 - 00:36:21:02

Speaker 2

And I actually tripped over this blog post by, Cuba by Wiki, who's a designer in government who wrote this really just nice and simple post called Public Luxuries and how we should and could have nice things accessible to the public. Perhaps riffing on the word luxury is these kind of nice to have additional extras in our life?

00:36:21:02 - 00:36:47:07

Speaker 2

And he wrote this, which I just kind of wanted to pick out. That luxury is a strange term to use here. Scarcity, exclusivity and status are important parts of achieving it, but utility, quality and story are others is also used to describe things that we don't really need but might really, really like. Putting public in front of the word luxury, reclaims it and opens it up.

00:36:47:09 - 00:37:12:05

Speaker 2

Why can't more really nice things be accessible? Why can't public services exceed expectations? I'm slightly obsessed with this concept, and we'd love for more of us in the public sector to aspire for creating luxury. And I kind of love the riff that he's coming up this on in terms of enjoying nice things, beautiful gems, lovely museum experiences in the public realm, services that work for us.

00:37:12:07 - 00:37:33:15

Speaker 2

And I want to sort of think a bit more about this is if we take those elements of what we might deem as luxury and apply them into public services, what does that not mean? And I sort of started dwelling on this memory where I had a brief foray into touching into really a project that was called life, from participle.

00:37:33:17 - 00:37:59:12

Speaker 2

some of you might have read Hilary Cottom speak on Radical Help. Hilary was one of the founders of parties for a lot of genuine whole work, was involved in running participle as well, and what they did is often spin up new sort of public services that were more about, I guess, relational forms of designing services or services that really focused on building relationships and connectivity in communities.

00:37:59:14 - 00:38:21:23

Speaker 2

And in 2009, Swindon Borough Council, participle and a number of local families developed and prototyped a highly successful framework. You could call that really kind of part of a service to support families in chronic crisis and to help build new lives. And this new approach was called the Life program, building new lives for individuals and families to enjoy.

00:38:21:23 - 00:38:45:14

Speaker 2

And I got little chance to spend a bit of time doing some very fringe design work on this. and in this study, when they looked specifically at one worker's engagement with a teenager in one specific family, they were able to plot the following 74% of their time was spent on administration, monitoring, tracking, filling in forms, data, recording, reporting, creating a paper trail, attending multi agency meetings.

00:38:45:14 - 00:39:07:12

Speaker 2

I mean, in 2024 we'd probably all not along with that and say that sounds really familiar. 12% of the time was spent supporting the teenager indirectly through liaison with other agencies, for example, educational welfare schools, admission boards, 14% of the time was actually spent in the family home, and the majority of this time was spent collecting that information to do all of that processing.

00:39:07:14 - 00:39:28:17

Speaker 2

And this means, you know, overall, that next to no time was really spent on a relationship that supports change. And in addition to this, most interventions that they did focused on one family member and in relation to one aspect of the problem, maybe it was alcohol abuse, signs of violence, and the gender was really about the system at play, not the whole family.

00:39:28:17 - 00:39:53:04

Speaker 2

And what I think life did for be very clever about taking a more holistic and relational approach to supporting people with give people the front line more time. And we could consider that as a luxury in designing and delivering a public service. So I'm fascinated by this idea of what do we mean when we say a luxury service?

00:39:53:06 - 00:40:16:09

Speaker 2

Is it about something being a sphere and beautiful and something that we might think about as unattainable when we get a chance to sort of experience it very infrequently? Or is luxury about taking the elements of what feels luxurious to us and applying that to things like public services more time, more flexibility, more trust? I don't know, but I just think that's a really fascinating jump into that.

00:40:16:09 - 00:40:19:11

Speaker 2

And I think we saw an element of that in participles work with life.

00:40:19:11 - 00:40:52:01

Lou

Yeah, I think this there's something really interesting actually here about the moral undertones of luxury. And it sort of feels like the same people who would rail against someone who's receiving benefits, going on holiday or being treated with respect and time and maybe receiving, you know, a personalized service or something like that might be similar or akin to the person in the Middle Ages who thought that having, you know, a silk outfit made you poor and lazy and steal things, there's a real judgment around who should and shouldn't get access to luxury.

00:40:52:01 - 00:41:21:21

Lou

And I think it really comes down to the fact that we often do prioritize joy and pleasure and kindness and trust and all the things that we kind of associate with luxury in favor of utility when times get tough. So when things are constrained, when time is short, when budgets are short, we prioritize utility over the things that we associate with luxury, even though those things are maybe not necessarily more expensive to provide.

00:41:21:23 - 00:42:02:21

Lou

And it makes me wonder, actually, what sort of conversations Bazalgette might have had when he was talking about adding those huge ornamented columns and balustrades and beautiful elements to the Cross Ness Pumping Station, you know, which basically is a big piece of power utility. But it's beautiful. And I think there's actually this really important point here that the moral judgment actually kind of gets in the way of, decision making when it comes to saying who should and shouldn't get access to the things that actually we associate with luxury.

00:42:02:21 - 00:42:12:02

Lou

And I think that's a really important thing to check ourselves on. because often those things are not more expensive for us to provide, as we've just talked about.

00:42:12:04 - 00:42:18:14

Speaker 2

Yeah. Like, why can't we have luxury for everyone? Why can our palaces have ornate columns?

00:42:18:16 - 00:42:21:22

Lou

Precisely. I would like an ornate Pu palace, please.

00:42:21:23 - 00:42:45:06

Speaker 2

Well, let's build it. The trains, I think going back in the great trains I get fascinated by sort of tricked trains. Seem like the kind of like, core topic that you can use to explain a lot of the world, like the industrial revolution and capitalism, all sorts of things. So let's focus on trains for a second. and we might think of them in some sense as a dawn of a more visceral class system and transport.

00:42:45:06 - 00:43:08:08

Speaker 2

And over time, actually, I think what's kind of interesting about trains is they were actually a great social equalizer in the early 1800s. Britain was divided at the time between upper middle and working classes. Now we actually have a study done about ten years ago about how there's about 12 different classes, as you might want to define them based on economic and social cultural standing in the UK anyway.

00:43:08:10 - 00:43:27:13

Speaker 2

but at the time when we had these sort of three kind of core classes, at the time we had third class carriages, you had, you know, just to kind of describe them, timber benches and rows of 5 or 6, sometimes carriages were quite open against the elements that you're trying to take a nice train ride from London to Glasgow and you're being hit with the the rain as you head up towards Scotland.

00:43:27:15 - 00:44:07:06

Speaker 2

And it generally wasn't very pleasant. And there was a man called Sir James Joseph Allport, who was around most of the 19th century. Until 1892 he was an English railway manager who took on the general manager ship of the Midland Railway, which in its 27 years became one of the most important railway systems in England, and he was the first one of the first to really appreciate the importance of the third class passenger as a source of revenue, and accordingly, in 1872, he not greeted the policy, which was subsequently adopted more or less completely by all the rallies of Great Britain, of carrying third class passengers in well fitted carriages at the uniform rate of

00:44:07:06 - 00:44:16:07

Speaker 2

one penny a mile on all trains, as decreed by Parliament. At that be a great we should just bring back one penny per mile as everyone travels by train, not cars, right?

00:44:16:10 - 00:44:20:18

Lou

I mean, nationalize the railways. You heard it here last.

00:44:20:20 - 00:44:45:19

Speaker 2

Say we're not a political podcast, but, you know, it's undertones. Anyway, the reduction in the receipts from second class passengers, which was one of the results, was regarded by some authorities as a sign of the wisdom of his action. But to him it appeared a sufficient reason for the abolition of second class carriages, which therefore disappeared from the Midland system in 1875, the first class fares being at the same time substantial.

00:44:45:19 - 00:45:15:05

Speaker 2

They reduced, so third class became their main source of income and filled up their timetables, but other rail companies followed suit, and by 1913 96% of all rail journeys were taken by third class passengers in Britain. So to double down on the separation of classes and this increase in third class passengers and tickets being bought to men introduced Pullman coaches to the Midland line, inspired by his visit to America of kind of these quite austere hotel style services.

00:45:15:05 - 00:45:40:18

Speaker 2

Accommodation. Waiter served meals. He put this all in to first class train carriages in the UK and these were completely austere though, right like now, now you could even like rage as a kind of hark to the past Pullman train as a luxury experience with designs that have been embossed and directed by Wes Anderson, the kind of famous director himself.

00:45:40:18 - 00:46:07:19

Speaker 2

So we sort of see this. I think what's really interesting is the getting rid of this middle offer to actually create a bigger polarity in juxtaposition between, you know, a really luxurious experience and one that's more based on utility, but utility ultimately being increased because it's more affordable so people can use it. So we get into this, craziness and confusion about what do we mean by luxury and what's right for companies to do.

00:46:07:21 - 00:46:24:04

Lou

yeah. There are so many moral judgments around this type of stuff, isn't there? But I think what you've highlighted here is a really important point that actually there's a huge benefit to providing a better services for the majority of your users, rather than kind of keeping all your good stuff to a very, very small group of people.

00:46:24:06 - 00:46:56:15

Lou

and actually, there's a really massive benefit of providing a much better baseline service. So I think that's a really big question here of is it really luxurious if you're having to pay for something that should be part of the basic utility of a service, like for example, being asked to pay to reserve a seat on an airplane when actually you have to have a seat legally, or being remembered by a service that you use repeatedly, where you might just think that that is part of the basic service, right?

00:46:56:20 - 00:47:15:09

Speaker 2

Yeah. Like I don't know. Do you remember the other day when I phoned you and I was staying at a motorway hotel and I walked in and the guy said, oh, at the reception, I think it was like a Premier Inn. He said, yeah, just go put your registration in there. And I thought, cool, that's just like a security thing.

00:47:15:09 - 00:47:30:20

Speaker 2

And then it said, that'll be 6 pounds. And I thought, I'm paying to park on the side of a motorway with there is no other parking for a hotel that I'm staying overnight at. So surely that should be part of the overall service. So these kinds of.

00:47:30:20 - 00:47:32:13

Lou

Like real.

00:47:32:13 - 00:47:51:11

Speaker 2

Pulling the lever muscle, I can just imagine the corporate boardroom table of going, how can we get more money from people? And I go back to that idea of what the, you know, the British Airways dude said, which was like, if you're going to, you know, charge people for admission for something, what are you adding on extra? But it feels like we're flying in the face of that now.

00:47:51:11 - 00:47:55:22

Speaker 2

It's just like literally, how can we get more money from people? It's not even about being luxurious anymore.

00:47:56:01 - 00:48:04:08

Lou

Yeah, absolutely. And, yeah, just to point out, other hotel brands are available and probably do the same thing. Sorry, Premier Inn.

00:48:04:10 - 00:48:12:01

Speaker 2

No, let's be fair, other hotel rooms available and don't charge you, although it feels like it is a sort of rolling pass a no of services. Anyway.

00:48:12:07 - 00:48:35:06

Lou

It is, and I've definitely been in those conversations where there is this, you know, you can kind of work yourself up into a bit of a froth thinking about, oh, well, that thing is luxurious. Oh, well, they should definitely pay extra for that thing. And it is such a subjective value. But I think the examples that you've given, there are great examples of the fact that actually luxury doesn't really work backwards.

00:48:35:08 - 00:48:59:08

Lou

You can't really retrospectively ask people to pay for things that used to be perceived as basic parts of the service, without causing some upset and irritation, as you can hear from our experience here. So yeah, you can add things, but you can't take things away. And, you know, things like when premium is required to use a service, for example, it kind of isn't premium anyway.

00:48:59:08 - 00:49:23:14

Lou

So, you know, so the requirement for luxury makes it not luxury I think is what we're saying here. I think what's also interesting here is the fact that even the word service and design are also synonyms for luxury. And when you talk about service, somehow that kind of conjures up this idea of kind of white gloves and silver service.

00:49:23:14 - 00:49:47:21

Lou

And the word design also conjures up this idea of kind of finely crafted or, you know, kind of bespoke designs, you know, or the very basic, you know, a Philip Start juice or an Alessi mug. And it's something that we've actually had to fight really hard against in service design is this idea that what we're doing is inherently making a service more expensive by designing it.

00:49:47:23 - 00:50:21:00

Speaker 2

Yeah. I mean, actually in the bare bones of service design, it's actually a great set of skills and thinking, a process to make sure that you're actually just helping a user do the thing that they need to get done in the most rudimentary and utility sense. Right. And that might seem really obvious, but the amount of services that just don't actually work are having a negative impact on the bottom line that sustains those organizations, whether it's revenue or they're, you know, kudos and ability to deliver a policy.

00:50:21:00 - 00:50:37:07

Speaker 2

Like, if we don't design services, then the bottom line of organizations gets harm. So it's not service design is not necessarily in every inference, luxurious activity. It's actually sometimes just about basic utility.

00:50:37:09 - 00:51:06:04

Lou

Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like I'm saying this on repeat. And a lot of the courses that we deliver, but most of the time a better service for a user as a cheaper service for us to provide, because a lot of the expense in that service is actually people phoning us and emailing us and getting things wrong. So things like, you know, kind of should go through a simple process, end up going to a human being to look at basically the cost of bad service design.

00:51:06:06 - 00:51:28:18

Lou

So remove that and you remove a huge amount of cost from your service. So it really isn't true that, you know, a better service is inherently a more expensive service is actually often the opposite. So take time for example, should we not be doing things as quickly as possible for everyone? You know, it's usually cheaper for everyone if we are doing something as quickly as possible.

00:51:28:20 - 00:51:53:08

Lou

Again, when we look at the idea of removal of labor from our user, this idea of self-service actually is often a completely false economy. And sometimes, particularly where that thing is badly designed, we end up causing more calls and more deferred cost on us, and things like automatic triage and decision making are often cheaper, but only if we are doing it right.

00:51:53:08 - 00:52:19:12

Lou

And if those things are badly designed, they will end up being more expensive. And then when we look at something like personalization, I think, you know, we've already talked about the fact that this is really a basic requirement of most services now. And if you're not remembering the fact that that person has used your service before or what their name is or what their address is, then not only you're going to have to be doing more costly rework yourself, but your users are going to be having to do more work as well.

00:52:19:12 - 00:52:48:07

Lou

And the idea of having a customer records for most services is now fundamental to making sure that the cost of that service is not inflating, and it's really only kind of like the last three of these patterns are actually more expensive. So large amounts of labor involved in that service. Yes. You know, there's no way of escaping the fact that if you've got 100 people, you know, beautifully crafting a, you know, kind of towel made into a swan on your hotel.

00:52:48:12 - 00:52:57:13

Speaker 2

Budget, why is it that what you were trying to get to are the explanations for that? But I was literally picturing a folding towel.

00:52:57:13 - 00:53:01:07

Lou

For this one. Towel? What have we been to? You know, no, I can't.

00:53:01:07 - 00:53:04:03

Speaker 2

It's really luxurious. There's a swan that's been folded on the bed.

00:53:04:05 - 00:53:06:12

Lou

Probably that girl's hotel had a swan call.

00:53:06:14 - 00:53:18:02

Speaker 2

It did. No, no, that golf hotel was not. It didn't have a lot of large amounts of labor involved. The only had a large amount of labor involved is because there was a mass quantity of people staying there because it wasn't small and boutique.

00:53:18:04 - 00:53:42:15

Lou

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm sure that they had a lot of people asking them questions about how to access that breakfast because they force people to book it. So yeah. Great example that. yeah. Also you know, if you come back to things like name of origin or provenance or exclusivity, those things probably are more expensive. You know, if you have something that's exclusive, obviously you don't have the efficiency of scale.

00:53:42:16 - 00:53:50:12

Lou

If something has a name of what origin or provenance, it's probably took a lot to produce. So those things are probably more expensive to provide.

00:53:50:14 - 00:54:11:23

Speaker 2

So so we are we starting to say that and I guess like because it's like a dead end. So we go, oh well, have we got a point. And most of the time for anyone who's visited before is not really but some interesting reflections like, I guess, things that are swimming around in my head around this idea of luxury and nodding back to that academic paper of we just don't know the answer as I'm sure IT services and what it means.

00:54:11:23 - 00:54:35:18

Speaker 2

Like, can, you know, average Joe Bloggs, who we lovingly refer to earlier, can can we really experience luxury is only ever. Is luxury genuinely only experienced by the upper echelons of society? Who have so much money that they can almost disobey the rules of anywhere they are and get anything they want? Or is luxury in the eye of the beholder.

00:54:35:18 - 00:54:50:16

Speaker 2

And relative to your experiences and what feels like is hard to attain, but you can attain in a less than frequent manner, like what is luxury services.

00:54:50:18 - 00:55:20:13

Lou

Yeah. Well I mean I think we've, we've distilled the fact that it is made up of multiple different things. Right. So you know all of those different patterns that we've talked about. But I think the one that I find most interesting is actually this idea of trust and flexibility, because that certainly is something that we really don't see in highly restrictive, more austerity era services, where you have to follow exact rules and do things in exactly the right way.

00:55:20:15 - 00:55:59:16

Lou

There is no time to be spending with that person, walking them through a more personalized experience, or indeed actually trusting that they will do the right thing. And certainly what I see as a result of that is actually far more expensive services, because that person is being forced down a hugely restrictive version of that service. It means that they're making loads of phone calls or asking loads of questions, that doing the wrong thing that accidentally, you know, kind of taking money where they shouldn't, or giving money where they shouldn't, or, you know, doing things that that shouldn't be happening within that service that are actually costing us a huge amount more money.

00:55:59:18 - 00:56:16:11

Lou

So I think there's actually a really important point here about really understanding cost outside of all moral judgments of who should and shouldn't have access to the things that we associate with luxury, and trying to kind of strip that moral value back from those judgments.

00:56:16:13 - 00:56:29:07

Speaker 2

I think that's really wise. And I, I, I don't think have a response to that. I feel like we've had, a luxurious a dead end and I'm just going to go and get my, swan towel and dry my hands after washing them.

00:56:29:09 - 00:56:30:15

Lou

In your pool, your palace.

00:56:30:20 - 00:56:31:13

Speaker 2

My.

00:56:31:15 - 00:56:32:13

Lou

Actually ornamented.

00:56:32:18 - 00:56:37:05

Speaker 2

Not just my pool palace. My ornamental column through palace.

00:56:37:07 - 00:56:38:06

Lou

Excellent.

00:56:38:07 - 00:56:43:11

Speaker 2

That's it for the Dead Ends podcast. We have hit an absolute dead end.

00:56:43:11 - 00:56:47:10

Lou

Would you say you have a swan towel of a dead end? Nosedived right into it.

00:56:47:16 - 00:57:08:19

Speaker 2

If you want to keep following us, we're on Apple Podcasts and Spotify currently, and there's an RSS feed on the Good Services website. And thank you to those people who have been writing in actually on hello, good doc services to suggest topics in the future. We're very much, hopefully going to do a few of those into 2025.

00:57:08:19 - 00:57:15:16

Speaker 2

But last up, next month will be a Christmas special. That's such a dead end, because I don't even know what the Christmas special is to you.

00:57:15:19 - 00:57:21:21

Lou

There you go. Well, watch the space. Find out if we end up talking about luxury sausages. Almost want owls.

00:57:22:01 - 00:57:28:07

Speaker 2

Great. Oh, yeah. While we eat, Christmas nut loaf.

00:57:28:09 - 00:57:36:09

Lou

Oh, my.

podcastdeadends

Sarah Drummond http://sarah-drummond.com/

Dead Ends: Luxury

In our sixth episode of Dead Ends we've gone all luxury. We talk what makes a service luxurious? And the romans (again), sumptuary laws, experience economy and what happens when we apply luxury to public services

Dead Ends: Austerity II