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?

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:

1. Good and Services are commoditised. They are everywhere. If you want to be unique and remarkable, you need to offer an Experience.
2. An Experience is a customised Service. This provides the starting point to start staging Experiences.
3. 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.
4. 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!
5. 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?

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!

How we similarily reduce Social Media to media

I think we also tend to forget that Social Media is social on top of media. We are trying to build relationships, provide useful experiences, develop connections and communities, create opportunities – but many are functioning on a level that will not get achieve these goals.

The connections that I have – the people that I am collaborating with, who are building with me, who partner financially with me - my communication with them is far more than a tweet. Of course it is! But so many are frustrated when they don’t get this level of connection, when all they are doing is just tweeting.

I keep telling people to Scale the Levels of Communication. What I mean by this is depicted in this model below:

The idea here is that by sending someone a personal email, you communicate at a level that would’ve taken 50 tweets. Not rocket science, but I don’t see many people doing it. (Three people I have experienced who do this exceptionally are Chris Hall, Chris Brogan and Robin Dickinson.)

No wonder people aren’t getting the deals, the contracts, the opportunities – they are just keeping things at the lowest level of Social Media communication!

Anyone who works with me knows I want to make things as personal as possible, as quickly as possible. My preferred method of communication is totally a phone call, because it it conveys passion, enthusiasm, stress, trust, discouragement, stature, confidence, frustration, etc in a way that 10 emails one after the other just can’t.

A phone call means I can talk it through right there and then – and even better – I get to hear your voice. I get to hear how you communicate, rather than just reading it. Even better again is meeting up. If up to 93% of all communication is non verbal (and the rest that is verbal consists mostly of intonation, tone – things that are very hard to translate into writing), then how little of communication are we actually getting through 140 characters!?

Let alone, all the people who are dyslexic, unpractised at communicating in 140 characters, too busy to really get into Twitter, etc. By hiding behind your Twitter client you’re missing so, so much opportunity.

How I practically do this

- If you email or tweet me good or bad news, I’ll call you back.
- I tell people when they meet me to call me.
- If have something important to discuss, I’ll do it over the phone and just use email to set an agenda. I’ll then email you minutes of what we discussed for the record.
- If we’re collaborating on anything, I want to speak to you before we do.
- When I’m connecting with someone, even on a low level, I’m always looking to scale up as soon as I can.
- If I’m building a relationship with you and it’s long distance, and I really want to make it work, I’ll go out of my way to physically meet you (normally that means I run an event and pay for you to come, hey Trey and Olivier?
- While we work together, we’ll have calls at least once a week.

Does this scale? I don’t know. I’ll level with you, my companies are small and I don’t have many clients / partners. But I have a very deep connection with those few, which produces working relationships that I have been able to build incredible things with.

This ‘high touch’ also creates an exceptional level of VIP experience. It’s the same thing that we put into Like Minds for both our participants and speakers. I spoke to all our keynote speakers, for instance, several times in the months leading up, and am still speaking with them now. That’s what makes people call it things like “a conference apart” and “not the same old same old” – because we partnered in this together through regular communication with all involved.

Let me hear from you

Literally, call me. Let’s be doers of the word and not hearers only.

Are you scaling up the levels of communication? If so, how do you decide with who you want scale up? Is it hard to scale up?

Photo courtesy of Pixel Addict

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.)
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Suspense is, as we know, the experience of anticipating an experience. This can be the first time someone interacts with you, or it could be the nth time. Your ability to continue to place your customer in suspense and not merely surprise, satisfaction, or even sacrifice, comes from your ability to manage their expectations. The longer your go on with a customer, the easier it is for them to drop down the pyramid unless you innovate in the way your manage expectation.

Understanding suspense by looking at films

I think one of the best ways to understand suspense and expectation is with films. When the trailer for a film comes out, we have a peak of suspense because suddenly we are anticipating the experience of the film. This suspense spike lasts for a short while, and then goes dormant – until the film starts playing TV spots and other advertisements. We go to the see the film – and our suspense is the highest right before the film starts. From then on, we are now in the experience that we were anticipating, and based on our expectations, we will leave surprised, satisfied, or sacrificed.

This above diagram somewhat sums up what we experience for most films. But there are times when quite drastically, the trailer created more expectation than the film delivered, and we have sacrifice – the classic line being “all the best bits were in the trailer!”

This lesson of “the best bits were in the trailer” is first lesson in expectation management: what is your end?

In order to know what you have to give, you must take stock of what you’ve got. What is the sum total that your customer leaves with? Equally, you need to know what you will receive. You’ll see why in a moment.

Consider the following three scenarios:

1. A B-grade movie knows that it has a cheap storyline to give, and short-term ticket sales to receive. Given that its delivery is weak, it front-loads the best scenes into the trailer on purpose, to create expectations (suspense) that it knows it can’t meet, in order to get people in the cinema so the studio can receive its money. Important: even when they give their end away at the beginning, people still come thinking there is more. No matter how much you give away up front – people will always think there is more, even if there isn’t. So the studio makes lots on ticket receipts over a short period of time. They don’t even think about getting long-term revenue here. This is sacrifice.

2. Apple know that they have a great, game changing product to give, and years of sales and increased market share to receive. Therefore they release information to create a lot of expectation and buzz, but not more than they can deliver on. There’s the suspense. Then, they back-load the expectations. This means they keep the best stuff hidden They know that if they exceed expectations and surprise, they have done well, and even if they just meet expectations and satisfy, they have a very loyal fan base to receive sales from. They are actually more concerned with creating lots of suspense at the beginning to get people talking, than delivering a surprise on that suspense. This is surprise, or satisfaction.

A new café opens in town that already has a number of cafés. They know that they have a ‘newness’ factor, a unique selling point, and high standards from newly trained staff to give, and sales, a customer base, and permission to build long term loyalty with those customers, to receive. Given that they are new in town, they must not only satisfy expectations, but exceed them (surprise), to get customers to return and prefer them over their competitor. The first months are critical for them to continually surprise in order to lock in long term loyalty. This is surprise.

All this might seem like common sense, and it is. What each scenario highlights, however, is that once you know your end, and what you will receive, you know how much of the end to show, to get what you want to receive. A general rule of thumb is:

• If receiving short-term gain, front-load the expectations, in order to get numbers and sales in a spike.
• If receiving long-term gain, back-load the expectations, so that your over delivery gets people back for the next thing you do.

If you find that you’re running events, for example, but no one is coming back – then this may well be why. Why should they come back if you only satisfied them but didn’t surprise them? Given all the competition, if you only satisfy, then you lack uniqueness.

This is only a small part of expectation management, but it’s the start. Below I’ve given you a summary, and have asked specific questions from you. I’ll answer every question you ask to help you get better at this.

Actionable Summary

1. Work out the sum total of what you have to give. This is called ‘the end‘.
2. If you want to get short term gain, give away the end up front.
3. If you want long term gain, give some of the end up front, but keep either a good portion, or the best portion, stored up.

Leading Questions

• Do you identify where you are failing, because you are not managing expectations?
• Does this model work with content marketing online? I’ve got a hunch that it does, but keen to hear your experience.
• Have you proven this model wrong? Are you having long term success by front-loading experience?

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.