Student: My name is Justin Bank. My question is mainly for you. But I think it’ll touch on the apparel side as well. I’ve noticed in the service industry it almost seems like a race; who can build the largest ship with the biggest rock wall or the ice skating rink and the same thing in the food industry; who can offer the most amount. And I know it’s becoming a juggling thing between value-added, what you can give to your customer and what the costs are. But do you feel at some point that it’s becoming impersonalized? If so, what are you guys doing marketing-wise to compensate for that? Is it becoming impossible for new companies to enter a market where the large companies can offer so much more?

 

Joe Daylor: Justin, that’s a great question. It is actually, you know, these are the types of questions we joust with at the senior level all the time. I think, at the end of the day, the journey we are always on is trying to determine what are the things that are important to customers and really what does that value proposition look like? It is really easy, I think, to get distracted by the competition. We are in the luxury cruise business one of our businesses and you know you can get very focused on the Celebrity Cruisesand Carnival Cruises and you get very focused on the ship and you get very focused on who has more cabins that face the ocean and you can lose sight of what is actually important to customers in the value that they’re are looking for. So we are really trying to focus on in the service industry especially is what is in that end-to-end experience that our customers are looking for? So what really brings a customer to a Friday’s restaurant? And we are finding that certainly food is important part of that, but maybe surprising, maybe not, it is not always the most important aspect of that experience. We’re really trying to understand in the end what is that experience we are trying to bring to our customers? And how do we create an offering that provides the most value? I’d say if there is an area that’s really ripe for some science and some discipline around how you really good at the development of services the same way we’re good at developing products, that’s an area where there are probably some real opportunities.

 

Dr Reimann: Service design is a very sophisticated problem and very fast changing as well.

 

Joe Daylor: Absolutely.