Like me, you will probably never travel to Bogota, Columbia, but that doesn’t make Andres Carne de Res any less interesting. It’s a restaurant—two actually, one in Bogota and one a half-hour outside of Bogota—that offers such a unique experience that it’s full all the time without promoting itself. You can get a sense of its uniqueness by checking out its Web site here. It’s in Spanish but you don’t have to understand Spanish to enjoy it.

Kaihan Krippendorff wrote about the restaurant on Fast Company’s Web site. He teaches a service innovation class using an 8-P framework that helps companies find the disruptive innovations that will differentiate it from the competition. Andres Carne de Res is a case study in disruptive innovation:

1. Product. Check out the restaurant’s amazing menus on its Web site. It pastes yellow butterflies to its local beer bottles and serves wine in hand-painted bottles. While the products may be different from those of its competitors, they certainly are packaged and presented in unique ways.

2. Price. Krippendorff got a menu that was a metal case about the size of shirt box that had a scroll inside and you turned a handle to roll it up or down to see menu items and prices.

3. Place. Andres Carne de Res is only open from Thursday to Sunday but it’s packed every night.

4. Promotion. The restaurant doesn’t do any. Word-of-mouth is enough.

5. Position. Call it “unique.” Andres Carne de Res has three dance floors, a stage, a piano, a DJ, and actors who interrupt your meal with improvisational scenes.

6. Processes. Krippendorff had at least seven different people helping him while he was at the restaurant, and the service was excellent. No single server here.

7. People. About one-third of the restaurant’s 1,000 employees seemed to be actors hired to play interesting characters and entertain the guests.

8. Physical Experience. Here are a few of the memorable experiences Krippendorff recounts: fresh-cut roses hanging on strings above diners’ heads; butterfly-shaped confetti falling from the sky; metal staircases leading you from “hell” to “purgatory” to “heaven”; diners becoming dancers as the DJ’s music replaced the eating.

What could you do across all eight of these dimensions to design an unparalleled, disruptive customer experience?

To read more about creating a disruptive experience, click on these articles:

• Do You Trust Your Customers?
• Walk in Your Customer’s Body Armor
• Bottom-Line Value of Customer Engagement
• 10 Critical Questions: Your Customers
• Ground Zero for Customer Service

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