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 is no longer a competitive advantage, it’s the minimum table stake required to stay in the game.

Our mobile phone connected world means that we can share opinions about what is great and what isn’t with ease. That means the business world has changed; it means Great is now the standard expectation.

It means we now live in a post-service economy.

The post-service economy doesn’t really have a name yet. It’s sometimes called the creative economy, or the experience economy, or the attention economy.

Even though we don’t know what to call it, we know how it works:

“Most of all, the market has demonstrated that ideas that spread win, and the ideas that are spreading are the remarkable ones.”

Seth Godin, Tribes, pg 26

In the new post-service economy the businesses that win are the businesses with stories that spread.

The businesses that win are the ones that give us a remarkable story to tell someone else.

To remark about something, that thing must first make a mark on us.

Then, if that mark makes an interesting story, we will re-mark someone else with that story. The experience marks us, the story of the experience re-marks the next person.

The remarkable story will spread, and the business will flourish.

So, to win in the post-service economy, design an experience that positively marks people in some way that makes an interesting story.