One of the most important jobs of your business is to stay in business. Sure, there are a number of other jobs-to-be-done, but if you don’t stay in business you can’t do any of those other ones.

And when we recognise that everyone makes (or claims to make) great products, and everyone delivers (or claims to deliver) great service, and we also recognise that staying in that game becomes ever harder over time. There will be attrition. Not everyone gets to keep playing.

When you recognise that great product and service are just hygiene factors, you have the benefit of choosing to playing a different game.

The benefit of competing on experiences, is that people want to be delighted, we want to be surprised by novelty, and when we have an experience like that, we want to do it again, and to talk about it. It’s in our biology, it’s rewarded by our dopamine system.

When you start playing your game in the experience economy, you start playing a game that your customers want to play again tomorrow, and that means that you get to keep playing.