Experience Is All That Matters

It's a great saying: "Be Your Own Customer".

It's only when you actually experience being a customer that you really know what it is that you are selling. OK - you might be able to hold the product you are selling. You might be able to go into the shop and see the shop. It's not until you actually try and find the shop for the first time, find what you are looking for, buy it and take it home to use it that you truly experience what you are offering your customer.

The key point is this: you never sell a product - you always sell an experience.

Let's take an example. The iPod. The iPod has been phenomenally successful. You hear people extolling the virtues of the "user interface", the "design", the "packaging", the "marketing".

Really though, it's the sum of all of these parts (and more) that is the iPod experience. The marketing campaigns convey a simplicity and "cool factor". If you go to buy one from an apple store (online or in the high street), you are wowed by state of the art presentation. You may get good service in the shop, or - if online - you get site that is well designed and easy to buy from. The packaging is so slick, neat, clean. You unwrap your iPod and just "feels" great. You just plug it into your computer, it charges fast. You download iTunes - nice and easy. In fact, iTunes is just as much a part of the iPod experience as the player itself. It's all so easy. Then of course, there's the user interface - the simple controls. On top of that it just "looks" cool.

You see - the iPod is not successful for any one of these individual factors. The total "experience" is what counts. I'm not saying that everyone has a great experience every single time - I know of people who have a had batteries that fail after just a year. Some of these are genuinely annoyed and will never use Apple again (Apple, take note - "must improve here"). Equally though, there are fans that will just dump the old player whose batteries failed and just buy a new one. Their experience to date was SO good, that the simple fact that the product was substandard did not put them off buying another one. Kudos to Apple.

For any business therefore, every point of detail matters. The message, the communication, the product features, the sales process, the purchase experience, the convenience, delivery / pick up experience, customer service, product reliability. None of these details ever stand alone.

Unless you are a company of just one person, you always have different staff members dealing with different parts of the experience. As a result, none of them get to see the overall picture from a customer's perspective.

The only way to see what you are really delivering, is to be your own customer.

Go buy your own product. See what it feels like. Is it good enough? Is it better than your competitors? Go test their products too. Now you're getting somewhere.