Turn Your Business Into An Experience

The famous Warehouse Sale, the big discounts, 25% off, 50% off, and why not 70% off, Buy-One-Get-One Free! Promote like crazy, make the signs bigger; repeat the promotions several times, no white space, add more offers below the fold. The conventional marketing wisdom is almost universal, more advertising is better than less. Why the hell not, the competitor down the street or on your least favorite website is doing it. They must know something! You are holding the evidence of their brilliance in your hot hands. Damn right, you did your research! You got to match ‘em! Or do you, and for how long? Are you becoming as smart as your dumbest competitor?
Ok, what do we do, you ask? Daily, weekly, and monthly sales continue to drop and the pressure from stakeholders is clamping down your throats. You got an update with the boss who wants you to have all the answers. If you can’t stop the bleeding, she’ll find others who will. So you think about today and you fold and snap. Let’s offer everything FREE for one day or one weekend and they will come. Collectively, below your breaths you think, what do we do for an encore? You dare not say it. So you press on. And now you’ve trained the customer to hold out and wait for the Really Big Sale. The Big One is coming, it’ll come, just you wait, they say.
Not sustainable folks! Turn your business into an experience and yes, they will come. And yes, pricing becomes less of a variable. The key is engaging the customer and turning them into participants. This causes the value of the experience to linger even after the experience is long gone, hence the justification for premium pricing.
Think of your business as a performance and your work as theatre. You are constantly being evaluated by the consumers and they continue to decide whether or not to come back for a repeat performance. Some experts have determined that it takes about 7 years for today’s consumer to forgive a bad experience. There is very little opportunity for a do-over. Yes, you can do that too in the milieu of your calling. And this is not a high-end merchandise or service argument. You product or service is the experience and the value of your offer is predicated on what your customer gets in return emotionally. What’s in it for me, she asks? Deliver an emotional experience and you and your offering will be on stage in the long term. Now go ahead and be magical!