I always use a terminology that you need to be playing in the customer’s playground. What I mean by that is that you or your organization need to be participating in the activities where your customers are participating. That point of use or where they are trying to get their job done. I asked Joe Pine, the author of The Experience Economy, Updated Edition, that question in a past podcast and this is what he had to say in an excerpt:
Related Podcast and Transcription: The Customer Experience
Joe Dager: I talked a lot about people need to be playing in the customers’ playground. They can’t sit there and just push information, features and benefits. If they’re going to err, they have to err, what I would call downstream in the customers’ playground. Is that what you mean, to create that experience in the marketing, to be there and be in the sandbox with them?
Joe Pine: Many different ways of doing it, but that certainly is a key thing that you are in the sandbox with them, you are there to help them in any way possible. There’s a class of experiences that I’ll call marketing experience, which is where you create an experience that does the job of marketing that generates demand.
You know, think about, well, it was two years after “The Experience Economy” first came out, that Apple announced it was going to create its own retail stores. I remember; they got lambasted in the press, because people said, “Hey, you’re a manufacturer, you’re a designer. What are you doing? You don’t know anything about retail. This is going to kill the company.”
Well, in fact, it catapulted the company. You know, over half their revenues now are in their own stores. They get over $4,000 per square foot across over 300 plus stores around the world, which is the number one retailer in the world. You know, from nowhere to the number one retailer in the world. The next closest is Tiffany’s at $2,700 per square foot, whereas the average retailer gets two or $300 per square foot, so the order of magnitude more.
They created this wonderful experience of going in the stores and interacting with all of their products that they have in there. You can apply that to B2B, as well.
Like the term, you mentioned the sandbox. My favorite example of a B2B marketing experience is actually Case Construction that created an actual sandbox, huge sandbox in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, for their Tomahawk Experience Center, where they bring customers up there to be able to literally play with the equipment. You know, use the front loaders, the bulldozers, the earth movers if they have those, and so forth.
They did a study and found that a customer goes up to one of their normal dealers, they have perhaps a 20 percent chance of getting a piece of business. But they bring them up to the Tomahawk Experience Center, and it goes up to 80 percent. Because the fundamental principle is that the experience is the marketing.
That’s one key way to do it. Another is with your service and support, the fact that when people call you, and they need your help, you turn that into an experience. My favorite example there, of course, is the one of our Experience Stage of the Year Award winners is the Geek Squad. You know, start off with a small company helping people install and repair computers, founded by Robert Stevens.
He said, “Well, who better to do that than geeks?” He costumed them as geeks with a white shirt, the thin black ties that are clip on; you know, just in case there’s an altercation. They have the black pants, the white socks that make the black uniform pop, shoes with the Geek Squad logo on the heel in reverse, in case they walk across anything where it will imprint.
They create this wonderful, engaging experience based off the theater that they provide. And you know, they, as I’m sure you know, they were bought by Best Buy in 2002, they went from something like 20 special agents in the Minnesota area too, now, over 20,000 agents around the world. Getting in that sandbox, as you say, with them.
There are other companies that can actually make experience their actually offering that this is the key thing that we are doing. You think about Disney. Disney’s offering is experiences. They still sell tons of goods, Mickey Mouse hats, Mickey Mouse watches, and so forth. They still sell a lot of services, food services, parking services, photographic services. But why people pay that admission fee, a very high admission fee to go there is for the wonderfully staged experience that Disney provides them.