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 in how you choose your words.

If you live here in South Africa, then you know about loadshedding; hours at a time without electricity. As a result, I own a UPS. Since we run online events, it’s fairly big and the batteries are expensive. Not off-the-grid expensive, but more than a small generator.

I know that cheap batteries don’t last and so when they needed replacing I went to a specialist store and I bought the ones with a 10yr life design. Those are not their cheapest batteries. They lasted 13months.

I thought that couldn’t be right. They framed the sale with a 10yr life design. There must be a mistake. I called the store, and after explaining the situation to the guy who answered the phone, he said I was lucky I got 16months. Wait, what?

Based on their framing, I expected a 10yr life design. If I’d got 8, or maybe even 5yrs I suppose I would have said fine. But 13months, and then to be told I was lucky. I was livid.

And this is a perfect example of what’s coming to people who think they are in the product or the service economies.

The battery guys think they’re in the product economy, but they aren’t, they’re in the experience economy. If the cheap batteries and the expensive batteries all last 13months, and if you don’t understand framing and managing the experience journey, then you’re going to lose.

No business can survive if your customers are livid with you. Given any rate of advancement in technology and processing at all, it’s inevitable that your products and services will be commoditised. When it’s all the same, and we can get it from anyone, we’ll either take the cheapest, or we’ll pay extra for a great experience.

A great experience isn’t the same as great service. Great service is how close you are to spec. You said the car would be ready at 10am. Is it ready when I arrive? Picking me up before and after isn’t great service, it’s a hygiene factor – everybody does it. It’s the normal kind of service. That’s painful for the car dealership because if I have to wait for the driver, that’s bad service, and if everything is like clockwork, that’s the expected service, the normal kind. There’s simply no way to win that game.

The alternative is to create great experiences. Great experiences aren’t about how close to perfect you are, they’re about how you make us feel.

The words that the battery guys chose, both in the initial framing of the product and in their subsequent backpedalling made me feel livid. That’s a losing strategy.

I get it, this is hard for those in the product and service businesses because they’re needing to teach their staff to redefine what the competitive value is. The battery is simply the mechanism for delivering the experience. But the experience is what makes people come back, recommend you, or rant about you on a blog. The battery is almost incidental. The framing matters more than the product.