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.

In such a case, it’s not about the film or the picnic or the vacation. One might even go so far as to say that the magic in the experience isn’t even because of the romantic partner. The magic is there because you care. (Whether you can separate out the care from the partner is another debate.)

It’s been said that the the opposite of love is indifference; that the opposite of feeling can only be the absence of feeling.

The same film, or picnic, or vacation shared with someone you are indifferent toward will not attain the same magical quality.

Care is clearly doing a lot of work in mediating our experiences.

Given that’s the case, our job as businesses in the experience economy is to make our customers care. As Seth Godin often says, “Would they miss you if you were gone”. Do they care?

Or are you ‘just another one of those’, in which case we’re completely indifferent to whether you’re gone or not because we can just go across the street and get another one of those. But if we care, we’ll drive across town, we’ll tell the others, we’ll root for you, and we’ll miss you if you were gone.

Let’s go back to the romance example; we recognise that care can be nurtured. You can’t make someone love you, but we recognise that there are certain things we can do and say that create an environment for care to flourish.

In business we recognise the same thing, we merely call it ‘design’. We can create an environment in which it is more likely that our customers will care. We can invite them on a journey, and if they say yes, we can show up in ways that they expect, that sometimes surprise them, that delight them, that create an environment for care to flourish. We’d call that a customer journey, or a customer experience, or a brand culture, but whatever we call it, we can do it by design.

“Make me care” — please, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, just make me care. We all know what it’s like to not care. You’ve gone through hundreds of TV channels, just switching channel after channel, and then suddenly you actually stop on one. It’s already halfway over, but something’s caught you and you’re drawn in and you care. That’s not by chance, that’s by design.

Andrew Stanton