Moreover, companies should develop memorable methods of mixing in the memorabilia so that the very means by which guests obtain the items becomes a signature moment, such as when young girls discover the hair scrunchie at the American Girl Place's Cafe. The City of Calgary does this in a remarkable way when it awards a tall, white Bailey cowboy hat to visiting meeting planners and speakers. Recipients raise their right hands when sworn in as “honorary Calgarians,” repeating an amusing oath (“I promise to wear my hat at all times … even when I sleep …”) before also receiving a certificate that bears an image of the hat as well as the date. Similarly, the Geek Squad pays attention to how agents bestow Geek Squad T-shirts on paying customers; they toss the shirts as a final act before zipping off to their next appointment.
With the proper stage setting, any business can mix memorabilia into its offerings. If service businesses such as banks, grocery stores, and insurance companies find no demand for memorabilia, it's because they do not offer anything anyone wants to remember. Should these businesses offer themed experiences layered with positive cues and devoid of negative ones, their guests will want and pay for memorabilia to commemorate their experiences. (If guests don't want to do this, it probably means the experience wasn't all that great.) If airlines truly were in the experience-staging business, more passengers would actually shop in those seat-pocket catalogs for mementos. Likewise, mortgage loans would inspire household keepsakes; grocery checkout lanes would stock souvenirs in lieu of nickel-and-dime impulse items; and perhaps even insurance policy certificates would be suitable for framing.
Engage the Five Senses
The sensory stimulants that accompany an experience should support and enhance its theme. The more effectively an experience engages the senses, the more memorable it will be. Smart shoe shine operators augment the smell of polish with crisp snaps of the cloth, scents and sounds that don't make the shoes any shinier but do make the experience more engaging. Savvy hair stylists shampoo and apply lotions not simply for styling reasons but because they add more tactile sensations to the patron's experience. Similarly, better grocers pipe bakery smells into the aisles, and some use sight and sound to simulate thunderstorms when misting their produce to better engage food shoppers. Indeed, in almost any situation the easiest way to sensorialize a service is to add taste sensations by serving food and drink.
West Point Market in Akron, Ohio, founded by Russ Vernon, was one of the first to serve specialty foods in a grocery store. Retail guru Leonard Berry of Texas A&M University describes this upscale market as “a sea of colors, an adventure in discovery, a store of temptation with its killer brownies, walnut nasties, and peanut-butter krazies.”22 Berry quotes Kaye Lowe, director of public relations, as saying, “We don't hesitate to let customers taste a product. Some people come in on a Saturday and eat their way around the store. Russ's favorite saying is: ‘Come see the sights, smell the delights, and taste the wonders of WPM.’”23
Services turn into engaging experiences when layered with sensory phenomena, as can be seen in the very earliest stages of life. Consider the task of feeding an infant. One evening during dinner, then eleven-month-old Evan Gilmore pushed aside his mother's hand, refusing the food she offered. So Daddy took over. In an act performed by countless parents before, the spoon no longer went directly from jar to mouth. Instead, it was taken two feet back and raised high in the air. With herky-jerky movements, the flying machine descended, accompanied by the sputtering motor-mouthed improvisations of Air Traffic Papa. Tightly clinched baby lips soon opened as wide as a hangar to receive a spoonful from each f light.
Believe it or not, this airplane game conveys the essence of what any dining establishment does to turn ordinary food service into a scintillating experience for paying adults: designing exactly the right sensations as cues that convey the theme for which the guests have come. With young Evan, everything fit the “flying food” theme and gave the impression that a safe landing was required. The experience stager eliminates negative cues (such as a sternly stated “Eat your food”), while tuning each positive cue (visually, aurally, tactilely, flavorfully, aromatically) to integrate the impressions into a believable and appealing theme.
To enhance its theme, the mist at the Rainforest Cafe appeals serially to all five senses. You first encounter it as a sound: sss-sss-zzz. Then you see the mist rising from the rocks and feel it, soft and cool, against your skin. Finally, you smell its tropical essence and taste (or imagine that you do) its freshness. It's impossible not to be affected by this one, simple, sensory-filled cue.
Some cues heighten an experience through a single sense by means of striking simplicity. The Cleveland Bicentennial Commission spent $4 million to illuminate eight automobile and railroad bridges over the Cuyahoga River near a nightspot area called The Flats. No one pays a toll to view or even cross these illuminated bridges, but the dramatically lighted structures are a prop that city managers now use to attract tourist dollars by making a nighttime trip to downtown Cleveland a more memorable experience.
Similarly, a single, simple sensation can completely detract from an experience. Think of the recorded or mechanical voices now heard everywhere—fronting voice mail systems, beginning a telemarketing pitch, guiding passengers in boarding and exiting shuttles, informing you of how to work a seat belt on an airplane, even giving you a wake-up call at a hotel. People quickly drown out this monotonous droning because companies don't bother to explore alternative creative ways of yielding the same benefits without the negative sensory cues. Here, the four realms of an experience presented in chapter 2 can be tapped to invent schemes to enrich the senses. How could an automated voice entertain—by using humor? How might it not only inform but also educate? How might it induce action to create an escapist experience? And how might the sounds of—or behind—the voice be so esthetically pleasing that guests just want to listen to it?
Adding sensory phenomena requires businesses to employ technicians who know how to affect our senses.24 Experience-based enterprises require architectural and musical skills not only to design buildings and select music but also to fill the experience with sensations that make sense. (In the future, hotels will provide “sensory specialists,” and not AV technicians, for meetings.) Not all sensations are good ones, and some combinations don't work. Barnes & Noble may have discovered that the aroma and taste of coffee go well with a freshly cracked book, but Duds 'n Suds went bust attempting to combine a coin-operated laundromat and a bar. Apparently, the smells of phosphates and hops aren't complementary.
Companies that want to stage compelling experiences should begin with all five principles outlined earlier to explore the possibilities that await them. They must determine the theme of the experience as well as the impressions that will convey that theme to guests. Many times, experience stagers develop a list of impressions they wish guests to take away and then think creatively about different themes and story lines that will bring the impressions together in one cohesive narrative. Then they winnow the impressions to a manageable number—only and exactly those that truly denote the cogent theme. Next, they focus on the animate and inanimate cues that could connote each impression, following the simple guidelines of accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative. They then must meticulously map out the effect each cue will have on the five senses—sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell—taking care not to overwhelm guests with too much sensory input. Finally, they add memorabilia to the total mix, extending the experience in the customer's mind over time.
All five principles—and not only the first one—together constitute the act of theming, or better, THEME-ing:
Theme the experience
Harmonize impressions with positive cues
Eliminate negative cues
Mix in memorabilia
Engage the five senses
Of course, embracing these principles remains, for now, an evolving art form. But those companies that figure out how to design experiences that are
compelling, engaging, memorable—and rich—will be the ones that succeed in the Experience Economy.
You Are What You Charge For
The transition to an economy in which experiences fuel the engine of growth is undergoing many of the same changes encountered in the earlier transition from the Industrial to the Service Economy. This transition begins when companies give away experiences in order to sell existing offerings better, just as IBM and others initially gave away services in order to sell their goods. Service providers, consciously or not, recognize the value clients place on the experience, but rather than charge separately for it, they surround their core services with experiential effects. Most restaurants, for example, still charge for the food even though customers come in for the overall experience. This à la carte pricing reflects a lingering food service mindset: charging for the activity of making individual items. Prix fixe (or table d'hôte) pricing, on the other hand, explicitly charges for the dining experience, a practice on the rise. At Moto Restaurant, for example, diners pay $135 for ten courses or $195 for the Grand Moto Tour of twenty (plus) courses; wine progressions range from $45 to $95. American Girl Place's Cafe charges a flat fee of $19 to $26, including gratuity, for its dining experiences—the exact price depending on location and meal occasion.
Ultimately, a business defines itself by what it collects revenue for, and it collects revenue only for what it decides to charge for. You're not truly selling a particular economic offering unless you explicitly ask your customers to pay for that exact offering. For experiences, that means charging for the time customers spend with you, such as charging an admission fee. Appealing to a buyer's five senses, mixing in memorabilia, minding your impressions and cues, and theming may create a greater preference for your offering versus that of its commoditized competitors, but unless you explicitly charge customers for using it—not for owning it—in a place or event you control, your offering is not an economic experience. You may design the most engaging experience for your service offering or within your retail establishment, but unless you charge people specifically for watching or participating in the activities performed—just for entering your place, as do concert halls, theme parks, sports arenas, motion-based attractions, and other experience venues—you're not staging an economic experience.25
Even if you reject for now the idea of charging admission—out of fear, uncertainty, or doubt—it should still be your design criterion. Ask yourself, What would we do differently if we charged admission? This exercise will force you to discover which experience will engage guests in a more powerful way. Bottom line: your experience will never be worth an admission fee until you explore how to stop giving it away for free.
Think about a pure retailer that already borders on the experiential. The next time you go to a Brookstone, watch customers meander around the store and play with the latest high-tech devices. Many wouldn't dream of actually having most of these physical goods at home or in the office. But notice how many enjoy playing with the gee-whiz gadgets, listening to miniaturized hi-fi equipment, sitting and lying on massage chairs and tables, and then leave without paying for what they valued—namely, the experience.26 Lacking admission fee revenue, one can only wonder whether the Brookstone chain will soon follow Sharper Image in selling only via catalogs and online.
Could such an establishment really charge admission? Today, few people would pay just to get into the store (or its website), although surely not enough (not, at least, as the company currently manages its stores) to sustain the enterprise on admission fees. But if Brookstone decided to charge an admission fee, it would force the company to stage better experiences to attract guests, especially on a repeat basis. The merchandise mix would need to change more regularly, perhaps daily, even hourly. Demonstrations, showcases, contests, and a plethora of other experiential attractions would add to the experience. Membership fees could provide access to trial use of new items or loaned “item-of-the month” merchandise. Indeed, it would no longer be another mere store but an escape from the reality of shopping elsewhere in the mall. As a result, the retailer might very well sell more goods.
Or consider Niketown. Its original design was steeped in such experiential elements as exhibits that chronicled past shoe models, displayed Sports Illustrated magazine covers featuring athletes wearing Nikes, a usable half-court basketball floor, and video clips of everyday athletes viewed in an intimate theatre. Indeed, according to a company press release for the opening of the first Niketown in Chicago, that store was “built as a theater, where our consumers are the audience participating in the production.”27 Through these flagship stores Nike built its brand and stimulated buying at other non-Nike retail outlets, all the while maintaining that its own locations were meant to be noncompetitive with other retail channels.
If so, then why not explicitly charge people to enter Niketown? An admission fee would force the company to stage compelling events inside, such as letting guests actually use the basketball court, perhaps to go at it one-on-one with past NBA stars or to play a game of h-o-r-s-e against a WNBA player. Customized Nike T-shirts, commemorating the date and score of such events—complete with an action photo of the winning hoop—could be purchased afterward. There also could be interactive kiosks for educational and entertaining exploration of past athletic triumphs. We're convinced Nike could generate as much admission-based revenue per hour at Niketown as American Girl does at its venues. Instead, sans admission fees, the Nike stores have increasingly become houses of merchandise. Gone are the basketball courts, the educational videos, and other immersive experiences, and in their place, more rows of shoes and racks of apparel.
Granted, an admission fee would make it more difficult to lure first-time guests (“You mean I have to pay to get in there?”), but it would be easier to get them to come back. And there's another benefit of charging admission. For those experience stagers struggling to attract guests for return visits, such as eatertainment restaurants, the admission fee alters the buyer's evaluation of the value of the total offering. For when restaurants try to recover all the costs of staging an experience from the food alone, people quickly get used to accessing the experience for free and then begin to view the food as grossly overpriced. So why go back? With an admission fee, guests rightly perceive each offering they consume—goods, services, and experiences—as reasonably priced in its own right. The same principle applies to direct manufacturers, website operators, insurance agents, financial brokers, business-to-business marketers, and any other cueless business that wraps free experiences around costly goods or services. The demise of many retailers—Imaginarium, Just for Feet, The Nature Company, Oshman's, and Warner Bros., to name a few—testifies to the fate of those who neglect to consider charging admission, as do the struggles of yet additional retailers—FAO Schwarz, Eddie Bauer, Guitar Center, Linens 'n Things, and, of course, Disney itself.
Disney's initial foray into specialty retailing outside its primary properties disappointed. Other than the Disney videos playing in the background, its mall stores pretty much looked and felt like everyone else's mall stores, and the blame lay squarely on Disney's failure to charge admission. Because no one paid to get in the door, Disney provided a pedestrian shopping trip rather than a magical adventure. Even when Disney put concerted effort into the architecture and furnishings—such as at its store in midtown Manhattan, where on entering you seemed to have been transported, for a moment, to Walt Disney World itself—the experience giant never harmonized all the cues. The elevator, for example, appeared both inside and out to be an entrance into Snow White's castle, but once you boarded, you were exposed to blaring rock music that had nothing to do with the medieval surroundings. And everywhere you found costumed employees (here, they did not earn the term “cast members”) totally out of character, talking among themselves. Perhaps this was not Disney's intention. Perhaps it was merely poor execution. But that execution stemmed directly from the lack of an admission fee—even one reimbursable later fo
r merchandise—and it certainly diminished the Disney brand by failing to live up to the company's high experiential expertise. Disney eventually got out of the retail store business, returning only when its licensee The Children's Place went bankrupt, and now is finally adding in such experiential elements as a “magic mirror” and store-opening ceremony.
Perhaps the right way to start charging admission is to do so for only a particular portion of a place, or for certain times in a place. Apple Retail Stores—where enthusiasts as well as prospects go to “Gather. Learn. Create.”—charge for certain times in the store with its One to One offering. With a $99 membership, customers not only get system setup and file transfer services, but also can book one-hour training sessions or two-hour “personal project” sessions with individual trainers. During every moment at an Apple store when these sessions are held—and Apple trainers hold a lot of them—a portion of the space and a certain amount of time generates experience-based revenue apart from the sale of goods and services.
At four fun-filled Jordan's Furniture locations across New England, the company stages myriad experiences (including audio-animatronic replicas of the third-generation owners, brothers Barry and Eliot Tatelman; a Bourbon-Street-theme Mardi Gras atmosphere; and an IMAX theatre). Jordon's, now owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, still gives these away, but at its Avon, Massachusetts, store it charges admission to the Motion Odyssey Machine, which takes audiences on a thrill ride simulating a roller coaster, a dune buggy, an out-of-control truck, and so forth, complete with wind and water effects. As Barry Tatelman often said, “There's no business that's not show business.”
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