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?
I'm a web designer, web copy writer and writer so all my services are customised. It makes it better for the clients but I think it can confuse some people. Often I think offering set prices would help people decide and many web companies offer that. But there is no off the peg solution to what I offer. Every client has diff needs and I have to work hard to understand them and provide a unique and effective solution to their specific problem:)
Hey AnnabelThe thing that really begins separating it is whether your customers come to you based on price, quality, or authenticity.I wouldn't try and make things too experiential if all people want is a good price. I learnt this lesson the hard way!Scott
Scott thanks for posting this. I can see why this revolutionized your business game!When he explained how coffee beans go from commodity > good > service > experience it actually blew my mind!Do you not fear that with a transition from service to experience that the quality of the service may suffer?Your post on fashion and technology adoption (http://bit.ly/bqVnl9) showed that popularity – or rather the *experience* of fashionable – meant the mass adoption of certain goods regardless of quality. That which is popular is not always good. For want of a better example: iPhones may be popular/cool however they could be shown to be technologically inferior to an Android phone. We have here an example of people choosing the *experience* of being part of the Apple tribe and suffering a poor *service* as a result (e.g. poor aerial reception)Is this not an argument that we should be striving continually to provide a good service (first) over a good experience, rather than getting too bogged down with the experience? Or would you say the two are interlinked if done properly?
Scott, I'm blushing…. Actually, it is an honor to have inspired you, and I can see your passion in the fruits of your labor, such as Like Minds.