September 16, 2004
A lively ongoing conversation on the marketing front these days is about "experience marketing," see for instance Bob Jacobsen at Corante>Total Experience. He points to a recent NYTimes article by Virginia Postrel, on The New Trend in Spending.
For successful restaurants, aesthetics is no longer an afterthought. Customers are paying for memories, not just fuel.
What's true for restaurants is true across the economy. New economic value increasingly comes from experiences.
Americans have not stopped buying stuff, of course. (Indeed, there's a whole industry devoted to organizing our pantry-like closets.) But the marginal value of tangibles versus intangibles has shifted.
Glenn Reynolds, buying shoes with his daughter, appreciates the value of services bundled with necessary goods.
British marketer Hugh MacLeod puts it bluntly:
NOTE TO SELF:
Your job is no longer about selling. Your job is about firing off as many synapses in your client’s brain as possible.
The more synapses that are fired off, the more dopamines are released. Dopamines are seriously addictive. The more dopamines you release, the more the client will come back for more. Your client thinks he is coming back to you for sane, rational, value-driven reasons. He is wrong. He is coming back to feed.
“We are here to find meaning. Everything else is secondary.”
Having acquired a houseful of stuff, I'd rather buy a service (organize that pantry!) or an experience, which doesn't require dusting or space or any kind of maintenance.
When they stop to think about it, coaching clients discover that every choice and longing has meaning, and that the meaning pretty readily reveals itself. Some Very High Good is what we're after, whether we buy a widget or a massage or a fancy dinner, or desire something even less durable, attention, reward, access.
What emerges time after time is the wisdom of aiming consciously and directly at what we really want, independent of possessions or other people. There may be many or better ways to get it--with or without stuff or more experiences. If, for instance, what we really long for is peace of mind, we may discover that we want a house in the country because we believe peace of mind will follow.
How much more expeditious and efficient, economical and satisfying, to develop the inner footwork that allows us to move into that peaceful state. Then, buy the country property. Or not. The flowers will bloom just as brightly when it's simply a house suffused with morning birdsong, not an idol clung to in the hope it will jump start the soul.
To give credit where it is most due, I learned this from Connierae Andreas' NLP-based paradigm, Core Transformation(R).
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