What makes you talk about a brand? Not tolerate it, not rate it four stars - actually mention it, unprompted, to someone else.
It's rarely the product on its own. Product quality gets you in the game. Marketing gets you noticed. Customer service stops you being hated. But what makes people advocate for you is the experience - the feeling they're left with. And feelings become memories, which is the only thing that survives long enough to be repeated.
Some brands are so consistently good at this that people will willingly pay more, even when something functionally similar is available for nothing.
The experience economy, and what social media did to it
When the term "experience economy" was coined in the nineties, the argument rested on memory. The memory is the value. That's the whole thesis.
Then social media arrived, and the value of an experience quietly started being measured in likes rather than memories. Which is a strange trade, when you think about it - people now forgo the experience itself in order to capture proof of it. Whole accounts exist to mock the person spending twenty minutes composing the perfect shot of a sunset instead of, well, watching the sunset.
I don't raise that to be sniffy about photography. I raise it because it's a useful warning for anyone designing experiences: it's very easy to optimise for the evidence of a good experience rather than the experience. Businesses do this constantly. The glossy case study, the testimonial, the polished launch - all of it proof, none of it memory.
What actually creates a memory
Joe Pine's definition still holds up. An experience occurs when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage a customer in a way that creates a memorable event. Commodities are fungible, goods are tangible, services are intangible - and experiences are memorable.
The word doing the work there is intentionally. Memorable experiences are not a by-product of a good product. They're designed.
Look at the brands that have risen sharply in otherwise commoditised markets. Hello Fresh and Harry's didn't invent better food or better razors. They changed the experience of getting them. IKEA's Place app let people see furniture in their own living room, which is a small thing that removes a large anxiety - and it did no harm at all to their online sales. Starbucks built a ritual: your drink, made your way, with your name on it, waiting when you arrive.
None of those are technology achievements. They're emotional ones that happen to use technology.
Memorable experiences are not a by-product of a good product. They are designed on purpose, or they don't happen.
The emotional bit isn't fluffy
Research in the Journal of Consumer Research found more than half of an experience is based on emotion. Emotions shape attitudes; attitudes drive decisions. So when we say people remember how you made them feel, that isn't a greetings-card sentiment - it's the mechanism by which they decide whether to come back and whether to tell anyone.
Which means an organisation optimising purely for efficiency is optimising for the half of the experience that customers forget.
The honest caution
I'd add one warning, because this idea gets over-applied. Not every interaction should be memorable. Some interactions should be invisible. Nobody wants a delightful, dramatic, transformative experience of paying an invoice - they want it to take eleven seconds and never think about it again.
The skill is knowing which moments in the journey deserve investment and which deserve to be got out of the way. Spending your experience budget on the wrong moments is how you end up with a business that's charming to buy from and infuriating to be a customer of.
So where does that leave you?
Advocacy isn't bought. It's earned in the moments where you did something a customer didn't expect and didn't have to be given.
So a question. Think of the last time a client of yours told someone else about you. Do you know what specifically prompted it? If nobody in the business can answer that, you're not creating advocacy - you're occasionally getting lucky, and hoping it repeats.
If you'd like to build it on purpose instead, book a short discovery call with the team at Distinction. No pitch, just an honest look at where your experience is memorable and where it isn't.
