Kenneth Collett

Category: Experience Economy

  • Make me care

    Care is an experience amplifier. A romance is an easy case to illustrate the point because romance can pull us in a visceral way that we are acutely aware of. An ordinary experience with a person by whom we feel deeply pulled can easily seem like a good experience, and a good experience becomes magical.…

  • Merely don’t fail

    Experienced happiness (which could be customer happiness, employee happiness, or your own happiness) could be said to be the experience of reality meeting (or exceeding) expectations, and when reality fails to meet expectations one experiences unhappiness. It’s common to focus on increasing the upside, namely working to make sure that we meet or exceed expectations.…

  • Prize money

    I did a triathlon this weekend, and it was awesome. I’ve found that with all of these adventure sports, there’s a great vibe and camaraderie amongst the “competitors”. I say competitors with inverted-commas because we aren’t really competitors. It doesn’t really matter what our time is. We aren’t professionals. This isn’t our job. There are…

  • Trust, the experience

    The word trust is shorthand, and people tend to think it means something like, ‘the probability that you will do what you say you will do is high’. But I think that’s incomplete and we can can go a layer deeper by asking why… Why is it desirable that you do what you say you…

  • No such thing

    There is no such thing as good service, and there is no such thing as a bad product. There is just our conscious experience of a service or a product. All the actions you take in delivering your service come together as something we experience. If what we experience is a desirable, then we say…

  • The peanut butter delivery mechanism

    Most businesses these days are confused about what they’re selling. Bankers think they sell loans, and grocery stores think they sell groceries, and I’ve no idea what you think you sell, but like the bankers and the grocers, I’ll bet you aren’t selling what you think you are. If I can get a loan from…

  • A category of one

    You might be in a category of one, but you probably aren’t. You might be the only business that people in your city can turn to for a home meal delivery subscription, but you probably aren’t. You might be the only lawyer, or copy writer, or plumber, but you probably aren’t. The next trick you…

  • Be your own customer

    If you’ve read any of my blog posts, then you’re aware that I believe we’re now in an experience economy. If that’s true, and experiences are what customers use to differentiate fungible products and services (pretty much all products and services these days – if you believe you’re actually in a category of one then…

  • Why are we taking photos of fish?

    Why have social networks proliferated, and what does that have to do with bankers, bicycles and your business? Why is there a social network for everything? Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube; and those are just the catch-all ones. If you like something more niche, like trying to outsmart a fish – there’s a social…

  • Biltong butter

    I tried to have dinner at a luxury restaurant over the weekend, but I couldn’t stomach it. The evening started with promise; we sat down to the usual fanfare and while we waited for drinks and starters a well dressed, well spoken young man brought round not one, but two different types of breads. Accompanying…

  • The uncertainty of uncertainty

    I’m uncertain about uncertainty. In a fast changing world, especially a business world, we’re encouraged to embrace uncertainty. We’re encouraged to become comfortable being uncomfortable. That those most capable of change are the ones that survive. But here’s the problem… I think I’ve got reasonable grounds to think that uncertainty is one of the precursors…

  • Customer experience and customer service come apart

    Think of a moment when you were out in nature. Maybe you were watching the sunset somewhere, or a sunrise. Or perhaps you went for a stroll, or a surf. Or maybe you were sat with friends around a fire, or a picnic blanket. Doesn’t matter, just think of a moment when you were out…

  • Who get’s the callback

    At one of my recent team building engagements, the client had hired a firm of industrial psychologists to do some assessments and present the findings as part of the day. Since the industrial psychologists’ session was ahead of mine, I was in the room during the presentation. They made an error, one that cost them.…

  • The sales department at Paramount Pictures

    Why are those outbound call centres so bad? How is that we can tell in the first 5 seconds of answering the phone that it’s someone from one of those call centres? The first thing that I and most people pick up is that the calls are scripted. You can tell almost immediately. But I…

  • And the Oscar goes to…

    I don’t know how many movie scripts get written every year, but I bet it’s a lot. And most of the studios turn most of them down. Famous actors get sent scripts all the time, scripts with very big checks paperclipped to them. And they turn lots of them down. I was just having a…

  • This ain’t a scene

    One of the most famous races in history doesn’t include any runners. No bicycles or boats, not even a barouche. Oh, and it almost ended the world. I’m talking, of course, about the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union that started in 1947 and resulted with them pointing around 40 000…

  • It’s not about the beer

    Today in my CEO mastermind one of the business owners asked a question about enterprise sales. In response another business owner said that one needs to use multiple channels; that email and phone calls are insufficient. And then he gave an example. In the experience share, he described how one of his salesmen was working…

  • Why are accountants friendly?

    A product is a physical item you can hand to someone. A service is something you do for someone. An accountant will do something for you (submit your tax return). She’s in the service economy. An accountant who knows the law, and correctly submits your returns (the service) is providing a good service, and an…

  • The Sucker’s Game (pt 2)

    If you haven’t read it already, check out the Sucker’s Game (pt 1) here. So how do you tell if the game you’re playing is still a winners game, or if it’s become a suckers game? Firstly, you need to cultivate an awareness of your own assumptions. What things does your business or industry take…

  • The Sucker’s Game (pt 1)

    In Antifragile, Nassim Taleb describes a sucker’s game as a game in which “the benefits are small and visible, and the side effects potentially severe and invisible.” Shane Parish from Farnam Street would call this first-order positive and second-order negative, or negative asymmetry. Basically, suckers take a small and visible win in the short term,…

  • Don’t be chicken

    There’s a kind of Matrix effect going on. There’s a bunch of people living in a world that doesn’t exist, and they don’t understand why things don’t add-up, constantly taken by surprise and dismayed at bad outcomes. If you think the world is one way, and it actually turns out that it’s another, things are…

  • It’s time to tinker

    The way you make your product, or serve your customer, the way you deliver value, is a process. You do not have the perfect process. It’s merely the way you’ve always done it, or the best one you’ve tried so far, or the one your boss showed you. But only a fool would claim it’s…

  • But I’m not a creative

    You’re a lawyer, or a bookkeeper, or a receptionist. Maybe you work with spreadsheets, or people, or machines. Designing experiences is done by people who work at Disney, and that’s not you. That’s a widely held truth, and it’s wrong. We don’t ship the work because we’re creative. We’re creative because we ship the work.…

  • Make some trouble for yourself

    If you do what you’ve always done, or what everyone else does, you can’t create great experiences. That’s because the way it’s always been done becomes the expected way, the average way, the invisible way. It becomes mundane. If you want to create great experiences, you have to do things that haven’t been done before.…

  • Out of thin air

    In business, we’re often afraid that someone’s going to try to eat our lunch; steal our idea, or copy our product, or walk off with our customers. That’s certainly something to worry about if the stuff you make or the things you do are fungible. But what if the the whole is greater than the…

  • Can you bake the cake

    I belong to a peer mentoring network called Civitas. (they’re great – check them out) At one of the sessions today they said: Most business struggle because the product or service is not good enough  Very few products and services are really loved by their customers Consider the following statement by Jeff Bezos If there’s…

  • Escape to the edge

    Maybe you’re not in an industry that’s typically associated with experiences. Maybe you’re afraid that by using experiences as a basis for competition you’ll become a caricature, or maybe you’re afraid that you’ll look foolish, or you’re afraid that you don’t know how to do it, or that it won’t work. That might be because…

  • Framing

    As the industrial system becomes more and more efficient, and the difference between the spec and quality of competing products and services races toward zero, the shift by consumers to judge you by the quality of the experience you create is creating new winners and losers. Sometimes the difference between winning and losing is merely…

  • Include the others

    It’s certainly possible to enjoy a sunset, or a concert or a workshop on your own. But experiences are usually better with others. So try thinking about ways of intentionally including others in your process, whether that’s the process of making the thing you sell with your team, or the process of delivering it to…

  • What does the skipper do?

    Scuba diving is clearly an experience. It’s not a product, you can’t hold it in your hand. It’s not a service, you don’t have clean carpets or freshly mowed lawn when it’s done. The thing about scuba diving is that’s done in the middle of the ocean, and nobody lives in the middle of the…

  • Sausage factories

    It seems to me that a choice, even a passive choice, not to enter the experience economy is a choice to be a sausage factory. If you aren’t competing on experience it seems to me that the other levers will regress to price. If 5 stars is average, and a good product and great service…

  • It’s not about entertainment

    Given that the most obvious examples of the Experience Economy are from the world of entertainment, it’s easy to think that advocates of the Experience Economy (like me) want you to make everything you do entertaining. That’s a mistake. The Experience Economy isn’t about entertainment, it’s about emotion. If you give someone a good emotion,…

  • Second star to the right

    Thinking about the world through the lens of experiences isn’t how most people do it. It’s a new game for most, and sometimes a new game requires courage. The courage to stand out – because you’re the first in your group to switch games, because you aren’t very good when you start, because the new…

  • Stay in your box

    In writing about the experience economy, there is some danger that I’m heard to be saying that you should create novel experiences at all costs, but somewhat counterintuitively, you probably need to stay in your box. People often talk about ‘thinking outside of the box’. I’m not talking about that. The people you bring your…

  • You might die, but you probably won’t.

    Create an experience, and ship it. It might feel a bit awkward at first, but can you actually die of embarrassment if you start your meeting a little differently? Probably not. Will trying something a little different this time kill your business? Probably not. Have you got something to lose? Maybe your sense of comfort.…

  • Compound interest

    Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. No, I’m not talking about money – that was someone way smarter than me. I’m talking about compound interest; curiosity, attentiveness, captivation, concern, enthusiasm, importance, passion, significance, sympathy. You can apply your interest to your work in a way that compounds your customers interest in your…

  • How to win a medal

    If you’re new to thinking about the world through the lens of experiences then you shouldn’t feel flustered if you don’t know where to start. When we’re present for a great experience, it feels like magic – how on earth did anyone come up with that idea, with all those moving parts, in that order,…

  • Do things that don’t scale

    One of the aims of experience design in the context of an experience economy is going to be scale. We want to be able to repeatably deliver novel experiences that create a competitive advantage at scale. And to do that, we have to do things that don’t scale. You aren’t going to get it right…

  • No business like show business

    “The experience economy is only for creatives.” Well that’s just false. Yes, it’s true that I happen to run a business that many would put into the ‘creative industry’. And I regularly hear clients say things like, “we’re a bunch of [accountants / lawyers / engineers / bankers / practically any industry you like] so…

  • Invisible water

    The story playing out in my head isn’t the same as the story playing out in yours, and that’s ok. It’s probably also inevitable. And when we’re designing customer experiences, it’s critical to remember and so very easy to forget. We forget because we’re like the fish in the ocean who doesn’t know that it’s…

  • Blowing bubbles

    Of course magic exists. And there’s a chance you might just stumble upon some. And if magical moments are wonderful things that make life richer, then leaving them to chance seems rather unfortunate. Now, I’d put the chance that there’s a fairy living at the bottom of your garden very low the scale of reasonableness,…

  • Foreshadow the friction

    It’s a really good idea to use foreshadowing to maximise the potential of positive moments. But foreshadowing isn’t just for the good stuff, it’s really good at mitigating friction too. Let’s say that bad experiences are on a scale. At one end are experiences at that are, at their very core, simply just bad. Nothing…

  • Foreshadow the promised land

    It’s going to be really tempting to foreshadow the awesome features of your product. That’s a mistake. You want to foreshadow the promised land, and your product isn’t the promised land. Your product is merely some kind of magical artifact that helps on the journey. If you’re a financial institution and you have the fastest…

  • But not all the time

    It’s true that many great experiences are built out of many moments, many iterations, but it’s a grave mistake to try and be remarkable all the time. The remarkable experience you seek to create is way more likely to be successful if the journey you take your customer on is mostly expected and occasionally remarkable.…

  • Cutting through the fog

    Some people are naturally great storytellers, maybe even some people on your team. Some people are naturally great entertainers, and maybe they even create great experiences for your customers intuitively. But no people are great all.the.time. And so great experiences need to be designed. If you and your team design the experience, then experience can…

  • The courage to be peculiar

    The experiences we remember, the moments we talk about, the ideas that spread, they are all peculiar in some way. And yet we’ve been taught that being peculiar is scary and dangerous. How can that be? The case for peculiar If those experiences and moments and ideas weren’t peculiar; if they were the average kind,…

  • Make it an occasion

    What an occasion! Imagine people said that about the moment that the plumber unblocked their toilet… Seems far-fetched, but let’s imagine… An occasion is a special event, often a celebration. It’s something that happens occasionally. And perhaps most importantly, there is no law of physics that I’m aware of which objectively qualifies one thing as…

  • Pick your moments

    We’re in an experience economy now, and to be among the winners you need to be Re.Mark.Able. But you can’t be remarkable all the time, because if you were, whatever you were doing would become the normal thing, the expected thing. And so you need to pick your moments. But how? One heuristic that might…

  • Moments that win

    Competition in the market is fierce. And if you’re playing a game where the winner is the one who gives the best customer service then it’s easy to understand why you might be seduced to try and exceed your customer’s expectations in an attempt to beat the competition. Except that the winners aren’t even playing…

  • How To Win In The Post-Service Economy

    Service has become commoditised. We expect our food will be prepared quickly, and we expect that the food will be great, because great service is the new minimum expectation. We only go to the restaurant / hotel / mechanic / insert-your-business-here if it has 4 or 5 stars. Only 3 stars? Meh … Great service…