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?