The Key To Creating A Compelling Experience

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Scott Gould

Branding used to be all about market differentiation. When I saw your logo, read your brand promise, and used your products, the idea was that I felt different about your offering than I about your competitors offering.

That’s the way it used to be.

Today, we switch on the TV, and it’s often a hard job remembering what goes with what. That car advert that was great, but was it Ford or Citroen? Look online and place two recruitment companies next to each other, and what’s the difference between them, other than the logo? Both promise me work, both claim to be specialists, and both offer me the same service.

Essentially, they are offering the same products and the same services with different wrappers.

As my friend Joe Pine says, the next economic offering is now experiences – a customised service that is so compelling, so unique, so distinct, that the customer cannot help be caught up in the experience of it. This is what consumers want (see the video about it here), because gone are the days of appealing to need, and here are the days of appealing to emotion.

This of course is all well and good but a tad unpractical, because ‘create an experience’ is not the most useful of instructions, not is is obvious what an experience is, not what the word even means for varying industries. It’s easy to know what an experience is in the realm of theme parks, but what about online shopping or publishing?

Creating An Alternate Reality

The key to creating experience is in creating an alternate reality.

The virtue of most experiences is that they are different to our normal life. Most memorable experiences were memorable because they were not regular events. It stands to reason then that if by engaging with you I experience something that is not the norm (in a good way, preferably), then I remember it – and the more compelling, innovative and relevant to me it is, the more of an experience I have.

The way that I do this is figure out what the norm is, or what “the world” is that most people are living in with the particular industry I’m focussing on. Then, I create a world where all the negatives of that don’t exist, or where the positives are accentuated. So, if I wanted to be controversial: “ScottGould.me is a world where blogs have deep discussion, in a world where most blogs have no discussion.”

More examples

Geek Squad: th:e alternate reality that they create is a world where any computer problem is no problem, in world where most computer problems are big problems.
iPod: the alternate reality that it creates is a world where music is anywhere you are, within three clicks, in a world where music is on a CD, in album, on a shelf.
Disney World: the alternate reality that it creates is a world where happiness is everywhere, in a world where happiness is not everywhere.
The River Dream Centre: the alternate reality that we create is a church that you feel at home at, in a world where most church services are alien to people.
Amazon Prime: the alternate reality that it creates is a world where you get any book in the world tomorrow, in a world where you have to wait.

Some of these are experiences that are reliant on you being at that juncture in space, time and matter, and others are not, which is why I added Amazon Prime in. We’ll get into this more in the coming weeks, but remember what we’ve already discussed about the best experiences often being the ones that you don’t experience directly, like the anticipation for a movie or Apple product release.

Next time you reasses your products and services, consider if you shouldn’t start standing out by customising them into an experience that creates an alternate reality.

Your Leading Thoughts

You might well already create alternate experience realities. I’d like to know what they are…
How do you think this translates into social media and mobile technology?

Video: What Do Consumers Really Want?

Posted on August 1, 2010 by Scott Gould

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RD0OZCyJCk

If you can’t see the above video, click here, or watch it directly on YouTube.

Today I’m sharing a video that changed my life. I watched this in February 2009 when on a weekend break in Cornwall, and as I saw Joe Pine’s TED Talk on The Experience Economy, it resonated deeply within me because it explained what I had spent all my working life doing: staging powerful, compelling experiences.

Shortly after, I purchased the book and read it when I took a group of interns to Romania for a week in April 2009 (whenever I read it now, I think of Romania in an instant.) A few months later when researching Joe a little more, I saw he was on LinkedIn and I sent him a thank you message for how it had changed my life and my business. Joe responded, and from there we kept in touch. I was fortunate enough to meet Joe in December 2009, and Joe was very helpful with hooking me up with Teemu Arina, who spoke at Like Minds in Helsinki. Such is the power of Social Media! (BTW Joe is now on Twitter.)

My Takeways

I could and have spent a lot of time talking about what I learned from this video, but my main takeaways are:

Good and Services are commoditised. They are everywhere. If you want to be unique and remarkable, you need to offer an Experience.
An Experience is a customised Service. This provides the starting point to start staging Experiences.
Staging Experiences doesn’t make them inauthentic. In fact I say that the more you prepare for people is the more that you actually value them and care about the experience that they’ll have. Case in point: Like Minds is highly prepared to deliver a compelling experience to every participant – because I care about people learning and connecting.
Authenticity is two things: being true to yourself, and then being true to what you say you are. I wonder how many businesses fail on BOTH!
Whatever the level of Authenticity of your offerings, whether Fake-Fake or Real-Real, you can embrace it and make it work.

Joe has co-authored two books with James Gilmore that combine the thinking in this video. I would highly recommend that you purchase both Experience Economy and Authenticity (affiliate links), because they have given me an incredible way to understand economic value and the levels of economic offering. If you like anything about what I do, most of it has some root in these two books – either because I learned it there, or have found that I was already doing it but it was described there.

Your Leading Thoughts

Do you offer Experiences? Or rather, what Services do you offer that you could customise into Experiences?
Where does your business lie on the Authentic Matrix?

Scaling The Levels Of Social Communication

Posted on March 9, 2010 by Scott Gould

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what is a tweet worth?

One of the things I persistently tell my staff is “get on the phone!” When trying to get information, sort something out, or close the loop on a contract or task, I really do hate it when people leave things to email when they could so easily pick up and phone and do it right there.

Even when my wife says to me “I’ll text them” I say to her, “why text and wait for an answer when you can get one right away if you call!” The other day I even had someone say to me that they hoped so-and-so got their tweet about their meeting. My answer again was, “Phone?”

We seem to have forgotten sometimes that our mobile phone does indeed make phone calls on top of email and tweeting! Continue reading →

Wax On, Wax Off: Headfake Marketing, Without Marketing

Posted on March 4, 2010 by Scott Gould

Jim offers a great idea. He knows it’s good, but unfortunately a lot of people just don’t quite get it and therefore aren’t buying it. Jim is frustrated day after day when he sees how his ideas could be used by people in his community, but because he can’t communicate it, and because the community aren’t sure of him, his idea isn’t selling.

One day, Jim decides to stop trying to market his idea, and instead decides to show his idea in action. Rather than trying to promote his idea, he lets uses his idea to promote an entirely different idea altogether. The result is that in doing so, people got to see Jim’s idea in action.

Ok, so Jim is Me.

In fact, Jim is a lot of people. Headfake marketing – the method of using one thing to teach another thing – is as old as, well, the Karate Kid. Remember Mr. Miyagi teaching his young student to ‘wax on, wax off’? By teaching him how to clean windows, Daniel actually learns to block punches. We can use the same techniques today when articulating the ideas that we have.

This mechanism is used a lot in sales. When people ‘sell through’ rather than ‘sell to’, they are pulling a mild form of this (you know, the old “You might know someone who needs this”, rather than saying “You need this” trick.) Or how about getting kids to eat food by pretending it’s a plane flying into a tunnel?

The headfake above means you are selling to someone while giving them a safe way to exit, which is generally more pleasant. But there’s more to it than that.

How To Wax On, Wax Off

The reason why you have to pull a headfake is because, unfortunately, when people are too familiar with you they often won’t learn from you. That’s why Jim (and the rest of us) get annoyed when people suddenly ‘get it’ when someone says what we’ve been saying for ages already. So here’s how to start going about it:

You need to create some kind of distance, or magic curtain. You can’t let people see how you put it together, because that breaks the transformational effect when they see what you’ve done that finally shocks people into admiring what you do. Remember when Daniel realises that ‘Wax On, Wax Off’ was the actual moves? Thats the transformation you want.
Transfer your passion into the headfake. If you’ve ever visited HSBCreviews.com, you’ve seen the headfake in action. The lesson we learn from thrudigital here is that the headfake needs to be around a passion or a pain in order to provoke emotion. It can’t be bland, else people don’t get it, and don’t want it.
Make the headfake a mindshift. Do it to such a high standard that people are hungry for the next thing you have. You can do this most powerfully by making mantra and creating a phrase that people start using. If everyone in your proximity is using your language, then you are the master of that language, and can do with it as you will (just don’t abuse it.)
Tell stories. This makes it memorable. People forget what was said but they remember what they felt, and stories create feeling because we use our imagination to put ourselves in the story, rather than passively just listening.
Followup with by packaging the idea to take home. After the headfake (if you do it well), people will want you idea. You need to have a simple, clear packaged idea that they can take home with them. After you’ve worked so hard to make your idea clear, don’t make it unclear again with your amorphous mist of services. Present a clear, packaged productised idea for taking home.
Convert it. You have to master it, close the deal, and convert the headfake into your idea. This can be uncomfortable, but people are hungry for it. If people are complimenting you, then you need to just decide to have the confidence and go – stop worrying over whether people will buy into your idea or not – and stop waiting for people to come to you.

A Living Example

Randy Pausch carries out his famous last lecture here on the subject of “Achieving your Childhood Dreams.” What follows is an hour discussion on headfakes, before the final revelation that the whole talk is a headfake itself. It has passion, the magic curtain, stories, mindshifts, language and wholly converts the headfake into the idea.

Watch it here.

Your Headfakes

I want to hear about the headfakes that you’ve pulled, and the best ones that you know of. Let’s get a list going in the comments.

Photo with thanks to tico24.

First, Make Everyone Feel Special: Social Media Ethics 101

Posted on March 1, 2010 by Scott Gould

I’m struggling to pick what to write about after the incredible weekend I’ve had with those of you at Like Minds. There’s so much to say – not about me – but about the mix of people from all over the world who attended both physically and virtual, both on the day and in the weeks leading up, who made this gathering of like mind what it was and is.

My aim with event planning Like Minds was to not make as much of a conference as it was an experience. It’s something I’ve been doing and talking about for a while, and out of all the incredible remarks people have made about Like Minds (thank you all, so much, by the way), I was thrilled by how many kept echoing my sentiment and agreeing that it was an experience.

Make People Feel Special

Chris Brogan said both on Friday and his blog post on Saturday that Social Media is about making people feel special. I’m so glad he did that. Like I said above, I’ve been hammering on and on (and getting criticised) about experience – but perhaps now that Chris has spoken people will wake up and listen.

I feel silly as I write this because I feel like I’m performing some kind of rank-pulling by using the big names (and while I’m at it, John Bell also agreed) – but I have to get this out and into the community.

If anyone wants to know the secret to our success with Like Minds, I can tell you it in one word: experience.

Experience is what separates the everyday from every day – a compelling experience separates what is so remarkable that you use it every day from the things that are common and just plain everyday.

What Was Said, and What Was Felt

People forget 90% of what was said by the time they reach the door. This knocks all of the arrogance out of you because you realise that saying profound things isn’t as important – or memorable – as making people feel profound.

I think that many things are an experience waiting to happen – they just need to stop making people listen more than people can, and make them feel things instead.

UPDATE: I should’ve said that Like Minds Alumni Vanessa Warwick wrote the same words before I did here.

Photo with many, many thanks to the dedicated Paul Clarke

People Don’t Care

Posted on February 22, 2010 by Scott Gould

John Cass was asking some great questions recently about Transparency in Social Media. Rich Baker was asking similar ones too with regards to Film Four and Vodafone. My response to both was what I say when consulting on Social Media integration for my clients:

People don’t care.

No pretty picture today. No flowery language. Just let the reality hit you: people don’t care.

Remember Eurostar?

When everyone was angry, they went to the Twitter account for answers. The Twitter bio said “Official Eurostar Twitter feed. Not Eurostar customer service but trying to help get information out to our customers as received. Thanks for understanding.” But the truth is, people did’t care. I labour the point here.

If you represent the brand, you are the brand.

If people need anything from the brand, you better be ready to give anything they need -whether it’s your department or not.

The idea of customer care is so your customers don’t have to.

And that calls for some integration. With all the talk of strategy, engagement, conversation and the rest, too many people now vastly exaggerate what they can offer, and unfortunately don’t offer the basics of having something that works.

I learnt that lesson for myself again this week. We are taking registrations for Like Minds Lunch Time Talks and someone complains that the process isn’t easy. It doesn’t matter that it’s because they have to pre-order their food, and is part of us measuring how we are raising £100k for the city. They don’t care. And the truth is, they shouldn’t. They just want it to work.

Question

If you had to offer 3 pillars for integration – and no more than 3 – what would they be?

The Basics Of Expectation Management

Posted on January 14, 2010 by Scott Gould

Yesterday we went through The Pyramid Of Expectation, and understanding how providing compelling experiences (or failing and providing awful ones) is based on your ability to meet expectations. In actual fact, we discussed that it’s no longer enough to meet customer’s expectations (this is merely customer satisfaction), you have to move into the arena of exceeding expectations (which is customer surprise.)

Today I’m going to layout how to go beyond even exceeding expectations and begin to get into the realm of managing expectations. This is ultimately your ability to control what people expect from you – and controlling those expectations means you are able to exceed them every time.

Pyramid of Expectation So first, to refresh your memory and provide a frame of reference, here’s the diagram from yesterday. When it comes to managing expectations, we can do it on all these levels, as we went through. If you under promise and over deliver, you will give customer surprise. It’s a hack job, but you’ll do it. What we need, though, is something more than this, and something which has more sustainability and long term strategy – and we find it is in customer suspense where expectation management really flourishes. Continue reading →

Experience: Today’s Currency

Posted on July 3, 2009 by Scott Gould

When you go into Starbucks what are you buying? A product? A good? A service? Or are you indeed buying something far greater than coffee?

The idea of experience in marketing is not at all a new one, and indeed the general public can now observe that more often than not, the notion of experience is being used to sell a company’s goods or services.

But today it is no longer sufficient for a company to use experience to sell. Experience is itself the offering that consumers want. Experience is today’s currency. In a desperately over saturated market, an experience sets one brand / company / product / person apart from all the others.

Starbucks does not produce a quality bean (far from it), nor are its drinks made with the accuracy of an artisan local coffee shop or its pastries fresh. But, none of those matter. When you walk into Starbucks you’re paying for the experience of firstly ordering a drink exactly how you like it, waiting at the bar in anticipation as the barista makes your drink (not someone else’s), adding a range of condiments, sugars and milks, and the experience of walking out holding that green emblem in your hand and participating in the tribe of Bucks drinks all around the world. For that experience, you pay a premium price that is above that of any other coffee shop in sight.

Nor are Disney’s rides the scariest, customer service the best, or food great quality. But the experience is incomparable and the reason why it is the gold standard of family holidays. How about the trailer, ”Cinema, it’s the experience that counts”? What makes ordering a Philly Cheesesteak at Pat’s more than just eating a cheesesteak?

Or consider the iPhone. Many of the groundbreaking features (Touch screen, map, app store, VOIP) have actually been around for a good five, six, seven ten years on mobile devices (Palm, Vodafone Live, Nokia Communicator, etc). But these features appear to be new because whereas previously it was so hard to use and work those things out, the iPhone gives you the experience of exceptional ease. The whole reason why I have an iPhone is because from slide to touch to pinch there is an matchless user experience. It’s like Seth Godin’s tale of sliced bread. The thing was invented in the 1910s but no one knew about it for 15 years until Wonder created a user experience for slicing bread.

Consumers are cutting back… Yet… An experience is still part of the budget. Cinemas are packed this summer. Starbucks paper cups can be seen in bins everywhere. Apple sold over a million iPhone 3G S units in a week. Sure, the holiday might be scaled down, but the experiences that people’s days or weeks hinge upon are so compelling that they have become integral to their routine, and are pretty much non-negotiable.

Shift your thinking from using experience to sell, and instead customise your goods or services into rich, compelling experiences.