Okay, you’ve read, heard and shared enough about the “crisis”, so stop for a moment and switch your mindset. Let’s talk about you, your future customers and your business.
Today is the first day of the rest of your business life to paraphrase. The past is unchangeable and what will be may never be the same as it was. So let’s move forward. Time to elevate your offering and stage enticing customer engagements. Yes, I am talking about staging an experience for your customers to add value to your offering or as one person I know would say, ‘Wrap your offering with an experience.”
Easy enough said, but harder to do, less you understand what is the ‘secret’ sauce of staging the right experience for customers and not just delivering a great customer experience. And yes, there is a huge difference between these two. To begin staging an experience you’ll need to shift your thinking in two key areas; the audience and the offering.
The audience, a.k.a. your future customers, first need to be identified better. You’ll need to think about attracting or enticing your new audience by knowing them better and what would attract them to your offering. In the Experience Economy, this is done by shifting from tracking population numbers and census data to attracting people, real people. (see diagram below)
As you can see in the diagram above of the Progression of Economic Value by Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore, economic models use varying levels of data to identify and locate possible customers. In Commodities, the identification is simple, its a geographic methodology. As the progression continues, the level of detail refines and narrows to better match what it is a given provider offers. This type of identification works fairly well up through Services. Much of what we see in today’s economy.
When you decide to elevate your business to an experience, the rules change. It is no longer about tracking population sets and segmentation of population. No more stereotyping customers into constraint ideas that customers with similar data act and purchase the same. No more playing with acquiring a percentage of a percent of the population. The methodology needs to be flip from data mining to focusing on human behavior patterns.
A methodology that moves from information of population groups to knowledge of people. This methodology of seeing people through the lens of human behavior is called Persona Profiling. A mapping of human behaviors that then can be the framework for designing and staging experiences that are wanted and desired. A method of creating enticing engagements that relate to a type of personality and the desires and needs they have that are similar.
Experiences are personal and happen inside each person not to or for a person. We must understand people more deeply in order to stage unique experiences that add greater value to a business and to the customer. We need to map these behaviors that we want to entice and engage. True persona profiling looks only at the human factors. As I stated before, it is no longer about tracking population numbers and pushing out marketing messages, it is about understanding our customers better and staging something that is engaging and personal by pulling them into an experience that offers greater value and is unique.
Persona Profiling is about attracting a type of person. By using personae versus informational population data, we can design experiences and product offerings that speak to a particular individual or a mix of individuals. This creates a stronger connection and engagement. The messaging becomes more focused and the language used that is more familiar to a given persona about the experience. In fact, the need for advertising and external messaging decreases. Starbuck’s originally was created the coffee drinker’s experience and used little to no external marketing except word-of-mouth between true coffee drinkers. The environment and the customer coffee creation experience was the marketing. It eventually drew the outliers in and grew. Who knew a $5 dollar cup of coffee would be so appealing?
With the shift to Experiences, a shift must be made across the board of the business. The staff must now have roles to play, understand the language their audience uses and focus on customizing the offering to the individual. The product, whatever that maybe, must be tailored to the persona in such a way to make it memorable for them.
All of this personalization, customization and human behavior focusing is what the experience economy is all about. It’s about knowing the ‘Who’ of your customer base versus the ‘What’. Once we know who we are staging for, then the value increases and the offering shifts slightly with each persona. And for those personae that aren’t being enticed to experience, don’t worry, it’s not for them anyway and they would not see the greater value in your offering, today. Deepen the relationship with a type of person rather than trying to gain the attention of a percentage of a segment.
To learn more about the Experience Economy, check out the latest edition of “The Experience Economy”.
I leave you wit this quote by Earl Wilson, Journalist.
“Ever notice that the whisper of temptation can be heard farther than the loudest call to duty.”
I hope I have be helpful and at least inspired you enough to want to know more about looking forward and not backwards.
