At the conclusion of my last post I promised to share my connection between emotions, the customer experience and the other hat I wear as a video producer. Here's a top line summary of the story. In early 2004, I decided we had to develop a new strategy that would differentiate our video production and multi-media company. One of our very first activities in this process was to revisit what we really did- our work. Our re-thinking led to us defining it being to create experiences that touched a heart and reached a mind.
The Connection to Emotions & Customer Experiences
We didn't just pull the word experiences out of a thesaurus or use it because it sounded cool. The connection was more personal. We were fortunate to have seen the direct impact of a number of our productions on audiences, as the videos were produced for large special events that we attended. Having a few hundred people stand up out of their seats and clap at the conclusion of the videos, receiving numerous accolades on how our work had help make the event special, and the post event buzz the videos created, directly led us to define our work as creating experiences. This important step eventually led to a Google search on the words 'EXPERIENCES and BUSINESS, to investigate any possible connections between the two.
WHAT A DISCOVERY !
I remember that Google Search to this day. Discovering what was being called "The Experience Economy-a shift in the core fabric of business, the progression of new economic value to Experiences. This emerging strategy addressed the age old business questions of on how to differentiate. Remember, my initial challenge was to find a way to differentiate my own company. After reading my first book on customer experiences, The Experience Economy by Joe Pine & Jim Gilmore, I was very much interested and excited. Simply stated it had my ATTENTION! I wanted to explore more !
BACK TO EMOTIONS- Being interested, excited, stimulated energetic and exploratory, as I was after reading Pine & Gilmore's book, are emotions. As a matter of fact they are part of what Colin Shaw in -The DNA of Customer Experience - How Emotions Drive Value defines as "The Attention Cluster" of emotions. A little side note before moving to the connection to video.
The very first stage of any EXPERIENCE is ATTRACTING customers. It begins by getting their attention.
THE VIDEO CONNECTION - One of the real powers of using the tool of video in business communications is the ability to evoke emotions from your audience. As mentioned earlier in this post I've witnessed first hand that power with a number of our productions. A critical component of designing experiences (Including video stories) is to evoke emotions. How do you want your customers or your audience to FEEL? It just doesn't happen by chance. It is very deliberate. When we are producing a video story we always ask a simple question. How do we want the audience to feel at each stage of the video. How can we deliberately evoke these feelings into the production that will engage them or connect with them in a personal way resulting in an experience that they will remember and share.
Food For Thought
My goal for The Rock Your Customers Blog is not to provide content in the form of rules, best practices, do's and don'ts, or guaranteed steps for business success. It's not as easy as many make it sound. My goal is simply to provide you some food for thought as you investigate and explore business strategies to address a very changed business world and let's face it a very changed customer. The reality of today's business world mandates that we all need to THINKABOUT the business of business in new ways. Easier said than done.
ThinkAbout the fact that over 50% of all buying decisions are made based on how people feel. When's the lat time you and your team had a serious discussion about how you want to make your customers feel?
Until next time,thanks again for the visit. As always feel free to comment and share.
Best,
Bill
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