Today, we’re going to use that recap as a springboard into a discussion on the importance of weaving a compelling product experience.

When it comes to Haunted Hair Extensions, even a deviant like Yamazaki
understands the experience is the product

Let’s Be Frank

Exte is the story of deranged hair fetishist who steals a cursed corpse sprouting copious amounts of hair, which he harvests and sells to local hair salons for hair extensions. These hair extensions are actually cursed–and seeking revenge.

Sound goofy? It is. Goofy. Disturbing. Satirical. But Exte is much more than the sum of its parts.

Enter: Mami

See, Exte is also the story of Yuko, an up-and-coming hair stylist, trying to balance her career with caring for her niece Mami. And it’s this relationship, and Miku Sato’s heart-breaking portrayal of Mami, that makes this movie more than just another Ringu or Grudge clone.

I tuned into the family drama, but other folks see Exte as a story about the struggle for control, or the ultimate cost of beauty, or a testament to unrestrained feminine power.

Any way you cut it, there’s real heart at the center of this movie about haunted hair–and that surprised me, in a very genuine and unexpected and delightful way.

Enter: Professor Kano

In the 1980s, Professor Noriaki Kano developed a model that can help us prioritize product requirements in relation to customer satisfaction. Scott Sehlhorst breaks it down pretty well, but I prefer how marketada puts it:

• Fundamental Features: Think: brakes on a car. You aren’t going to win a customer with any of these features, but you’ll almost certainly lose them without.
• Linear Features: Think: gas mileage for a family car. Talk to customers about your product, and these are the features you are likely to hear about.
• Exciter Features: These are the features that your customers weren’t expecting–but love. These are the features that help you to create brand loyal customers.

Applying Kano To Exte

Let’s break down Exte according to the descriptors above:

• Fundamental Features: This is J-Horror, so a scary woman with long black hair is required. Check!
• Linear Features: The scary ghost woman must kill the cursed in increasingly bizarre ways. Check!
• Exciter Features: The family dynamic among Yuko, Mami, and Mami’s abusive mother. Hair as a weapon. And the creepy, flag-wearing, hair fetishist who propels the plot.

The experience of watching this movie–of being challenged and surprised by what could have just been stock characters plugged into a well-worn formula–helps create a final product that I’ve been talking about for several days now, much to the chagrin of my friends and family who much prefer Lost to Sion Sono.

How Often Does Your Product Surprise & Delight?

Exciter Features are not easy to create. If they were, we’d talk about more than the ol’ iPod scroll wheel and haunted hair extensions.

But think about this:

If a low-budget horror movie about cursed hair can transcend itself–can make you feel for a family that isn’t really real–is there really any excuse for failing to surprise and delight the customers we ostensibly know so well? Hair-raising, I know.

New around here? Subscribe to the feed to receive future updates; follow me on Twitter to keep the discussion going!

Bonus Content

Here’s a non-hair example of “the experience as product” wherein Peter Merholz suggests we focus on the experiences we want to create, first, then build the products that get us there:

Tomorrow: We’ll use this story recap as a springboard into a discussion on the importance of weaving (ha! ha!) a compelling user experience for your product.

< SPOILER WARNING >
Key plotpoints of this goofy, disturbing, heart-breaking movie are pictured below. You have been warned!
< / SPOILER WARNING >

Customs agents discover a 20-foot container filled with human hair–and the body of a missing girl. In the morgue, Yamazaki, the deviant night watchman, discovers that the dead girl is growing hair at an incredible rate. He steals the body and harvests the non-stop hair for extensions which he sells to local salons.

Yuko is an up-and-coming hair stylist at one of these local salons. After a hard day at work, Yuko comes home to discover that her drunken half-sister, Kiyomi, has dumped her eight-year-old daughter, Mami, off at Auntie Yuko’s house–possibly forever.

Which can only be a good thing for Mami, as Yuko quickly deduces that Kiyomi is abusing Mami.

Kiyomi returns for Mami, and Yuko rebuffs her–but not before Kiyomi shatters Yuko’s self-confidence by dredging up painful secrets from the past.

Meanwhile, yes–the haunted hair extensions begin killing unsuspecting women as Yamazaki grows ever more demented–and comes into contact with Mami and Yuko, betraying a very strange attraction to their hair.

Kiyomi eventually kidnaps Mami. Kiyomi accidentally saves Mami by forcing her into a closet–just before the haunted hair extensions attack.

After Mami is released from the hospital into Aunt Yuko’s care, Yuko takes Mami to the salon for a makeover… and weaves (the unknowingly haunted) extensions into the little girl’s hair.

Later, the police arrive at Yuko’s salon, hot on the trail of the serial killer doling out extensions with the exact same DNA. That’s when Yuko realizes her mistake. She hurries home, only to find she’s too late!

Yamazaki kidnaps Yuko and Mami, bringing their unconscious bodies to his apartment… which is completely overrun with hair. When he angrily snips the hair extensions off Mami’s head, Yamazaki is destroyed by the ghost of the dead girl he’s been cannibalizing for hair extensions.

The dead girl finds peace, and Yuko and Mami vow to continue their journey to becoming world-class hairstyles.

THE END

Tomorrow: We’ll use this story recap as a springboard into a discussion on the importance of weaving (*sorry*) a compelling user experience for your product.

New around here? Subscribe to the feed to receive future updates. You can also continue the conversation on Twitter.

Bonus Content

Listen to Yamazaki sing about hair in this disturbing “Music Video Trailer” for Exte: Hair Extensions. Contains spoilers plus some really creepy imagery.