Sales
The Experience
The Experience Economy. Experiential Marketing. Experience
Design. The term "experience" has become as
ubiquitous as brand. We hear it, and use it loosely in our
jargon, but what does it really mean to you and your
initiatives?
The Experience is one of the few differentiating factors
between products and services offered by competing companies.
Technology has leveled the playing field. Companies can no
longer compete on price, features and benefits, quickness to
market, or even customer service, because technology allows
everyone to make it cheaper, better, faster. And the Internet
disseminates information at speeds that make it nearly
impossible to invent something new. Your product or service
can be duplicated within weeks, or even hours.
So how do you sell? The experience.
And a "good" experience is not enough. You have
to create an experience that is a seamless part of the target
audience's lifestyle and ego. You need to appeal to the
emotional being—at a level where your message just
"hits them in the right spot."
The Experience in
Business to Business
Consumer product marketing has known this for years, but
this is also especially true in business to business
marketing. For many years in b to b, products and services
were sold by features/benefits and a good salesman who could
bring them to life. Many people believe it is the relationship
with the salesman. While this is true, it's not the "I
know you; you know me" relationship. It is the experience
the customer has in the presence of the salesman. Good
marketing communications emulates this experience and brings
it to life in all your tactics—from your sales sheets to
your web site and beyond.
The Experience in Internal
Communications
Internal communications and training materials should be
guided by experience design principles as well. Your employees
are busy, and, as you already know, they do not read a manual
or take a CBT without a compelling reason to do so. Make your
job easier by creating an experience in your materials that
energizes and involves your employees. Employees are consumers
bombarded with messages almost every minute of every day—and
you are competing with that. When your employee is faced with
an hour of downtime after dinner, he/she is faced with a
myriad choices—watch TV, take a walk, surf the Web or read
your newly released Policy Manual. How do you present the
manual in a way that your employee chooses to read it?
Experience Designers
As marketers and designers, our job is to create and
strengthen the experience. Our methodology is rooted in
experiential marketing which focuses on how your brand and
product/service appeals to the customer's senses, feelings,
thoughts, actions and relations (how people relate to the
world around them). Brand in the "experience
environment" goes beyond the logo to define a lifestyle
for your company and how it interacts, on all fronts, with the
customer.
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