It’s fake. Of course it’s fake. And that’s ok. In fact, it’s often better than ok. It’s often great.

If all your experiences were always 100% true beneath the surface, then almost all of your experiences would be on a scale from ‘meh’ to ‘bad’. The statistical odds of the serendipity required for great things to spontaneously happen is so low as to make it foolish to expect.

We already recognise this in our social conventions.

Let’s say that your friend makes a plan to meet you for coffee. And let’s say that they had a long week and by Friday they really felt like curling up into a ball under a blanket instead. If they were true to themself then you’d get stood up and that would not be lekker.

And so we don’t do that. We fake it. We show up when we said we would, where we said we would, and if we have the strength of character, we show up as the best version of ourself. And in that moment, that might be a simulacrum of ourselves. And that’s the generous thing to do.

And so it is with your customers and the experiences you create. The actress playing Snow White at the theatre might have had a fight with the neighbour above her at 2am this morning and maybe she didn’t get much sleep, but when your 7 year daughter sees her, she doesn’t want the tired, cranky Snow White, she wants the ‘real’ Snow White, and by real, she wants the fake one. The one she expects.

And so when you are designing and executing experiences for your customers, remember that the best version is unlikely to be the serendipitous version Instead, it’s likely to be the version that was chosen with intent and delivered on purpose, regardless of how you feel in the moment, and if that’s ‘fake’, well then that’s just fine.