The Catch 22 of Creating Positive Experiences – Brian Solis review

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In Brian Solis’ new book “What’s the Future of Business?” I was struck with what I think are the two real challenge faced by many marketers and businesses.

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The first challenge is trying to get off the never ending treadmill of “responding to negative” client experiences (so that we can focus on the positive).

The second challenge is in actually creating the positive experiences because we must cross a chasm and go through the discomfort of trying things that don’t work.

Yes it’s time to invest in proactive experiences… Experience is everything. And businesses must create experiences that mean something.” (page 9).

Logically, this makes sense to me and probably does to most marketers and business owners.

Positive outweighs negative

It also makes logical sense that the ‘net impact’ of creating positive experiences is far higher than constantly pandering to the squeaky wheel of people who’ve had negative experiences.

..the cost of reacting to experiences is far greater than proactively defining experiences from the outset. (Page 8)

After people have negative experiences, it is quite common to turn them around into advocates.

However, any favourable outcome is weighed against the cost of the initial negative experience – or more importantly, the cost of of how that negative experience was shared and how it ultimately impacted others. (Page 8)

Ok, so let’s focus our energy and resources on creating some positive experiences!

Catch 22

The Catch 22 dilemma is that to create the great experiences, you must endure the fallout from a few experiences that don’t quite hit the mark.

And it is summed up beautifully with a quote later in the book:

Good judgement comes from experience, and experiences comes from bad judgement – Barry LePatner (Page 164)

It gets tricky when ‘the rubber meets the road’ because businesses must embrace trial and error. And yes they must face failure.

We all ‘get’ that positive experiences are the way to go. But it’s often too confronting and uncomfortable for most businesses to be vulnerable enough, open enough, and experimental enough to cross the chasm to be able to create genuine positive experiences.

We must also accept there will be collateral damage and some displeased customers when things don’t quite go right.

The only guarantee is that if you don’t go down this path of creating positive experiences, you will slowly lose attention, trust and customers one at a time until there are none left.

So what must we do?

Bake experience into the product

User experience, or UX as it is known to industry professionals, is the art and science of designing something so it is a joy for the user. (Not a narcissistic design aimed to impress decision makers, stakeholders and the designer themselves, at the expense of the end-use, the customer!)

If the product is remarkable (using Seth Godin’s vernacular) people will spread the word, market your product for you and you’ll be creating powerful positive experiences that propegate.

The remarkable experience must be baked into the product, not added afterwards. Think of how some website homepages just make sense, how you can use some mobile apps first go, or how some items like fridges, TVs and computers need instruction manuals and some are simply intuitive!

In this social and connected economy UX is a competitive advantage. (Page 152)

The difference between a great positive experience (worth sharing) and a terrible experience (worth sharing) is the UX that is baked in. Finally, when designing your user experience, remember one thing…