Thursday August 25, 2005

The five million dollar question

I was prepared to go into more about the "architecture-versus-brand-strategy" conversation (it's really architecture-as-a-component-of-brand-strategy) as part of my EA Recap Week 2005, but all bets are off today as the following question sprung up and I can't take my brain away from it.

That question: what sort of "sales" center would yours be if your typical customer dropped, let's say, $5 million dollars with each sale?

Wow. The mind boggles. Prada is only shooting for a few thousand per sale, and lookit them. Volkswagen already has you sold on a $30,000 car by the time you experience the amazing Volkswagen Autostadt. Heck, Disney's only gouged you for a few hundred by the time you're through with them, yet they've given most their visitors something they perceive to be the memory of a lifetime.

In thinking this through, let's be industry-agnostic for a second. Forget that it's "your" industry. Forget business, forget verticals, forget everything you know about your company's or client's current situation, and focus solely on a few things:

• Let's say your customer spends millions on you with each sale
• Let's sayd it sometimes can take a handful of visits to complete the sale
• Let's say competitors don't really have a leg up on you, not with the goods/services they're selling, nor with the experience they provide at their own sales facility.

Okay, so those are the obvious assumptions. Let's add a few more less obvious ones, which still need to be considered:

• These are human beings first, customers second.
• As human beings, we respond favorably to personal attention.
• As human beings, we stick with people we like -- people like us, people who understand us, people who seem to be part of our tribe.
• And we respond well to stories. Especially when those stories involve personal attention and, er, tribal affinity.

All of which lead me to believe that "experiences" such as the Volkswagen Autostadt or upper-class travel for British Airways or Virgin are a bit closer to the mark than not, for the simple reason that when it comes time to plan, design and build out these spces, they've acknowledged these basic fundamentals long before they even consider talking about the design, technology, or messaging that's going to drive these spaces.

Or put another way, they understand their high-value customers better than most of us. Not that they're perfect -- 10 minutes with product marketing whiz Peter Wilton will convince you that the airlines are far from it -- but as I said, they're better than most of us who might be tempted to lead off these conversations talking gizmospeak and carpet choices long before acquiring a deeper understanding of our customers.

Millions of dollars per sale. What's it going to be?

[Insert dramatic pause.]

And that ends today's diatribe...keep those cards, letters and donations coming to me -- firstname.lastname@sun.com.

On a very related note, Joe Pine and James Gilmore -- the very bright people behind The Experience Economy -- are hosting the ThinkAbout conference next month in Colorado. Their agenda is to make much more sense of all this "experience" stuff than I do here, and word has it that they're very good at it. Tom Peters headlines. See you there?

( Aug 25 2005, 04:18:09 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]