How customer experience drives business growth

When we design campaigns for digital marketing, there’s always a process that we follow to ensure its success. We think about the audience that we want to target and which platform we are going to use to reach the selected audience and when. We indeed think about the product or services that we are advertising – our goal is to increase sales. But the success of any campaign depends heavily in the choice of the right environment rather than the quality of the product. We have seen the exact same campaign fail in one environment and succeed in another.

Nowadays, it’s getting harder and harder to differentiate your business from competitors. While it’s important to consider the effective advantage, new product offerings, or competitiveness of your price, what has become a crucial point of difference is the experience you offer.

To simplify, we’ll go through this social experiment that Joshua Bell did back in 2007 (watch it here) to understand how the way we value things or the perceived quality of one product can easily change.

Joshua Bell is a famous violinist. In one of the images below, he is playing his Stradivari from 1713, a violin worth 4 million dollars. The Boston Symphony Hall was sold out with the ‘cheap’ tickets being sold for about $100.

3 days after his successful performance, Joshua was asked by the Washington Post to participate in a social experiment. The idea was to put Joshua in a different environment and see the public’s reaction. Joshua Bell performed this time in a subway station in Washington DC dressed as a busker. He recreated the exact same performance at the Boston Symphony Hall with the same Stradivari violin, but this time the audience was the morning commuters in the station.

As you can imagine, the public didn’t keep quiet during his performance. Joshua made around 30 dollars and only 7 people stopped to listen.     

This experiment criticises our society’s behaviour towards buskers and reflects on the ‘rushed lives’ that we all have. When analysed from a marketing perspective, it says a lot about how products are sold.

If you think about it, everything was different. It wasn’t the right audience, it wasn’t the right time, it wasn’t the right place… 

Potential audiences can’t judge or appreciate a product without context or branding. Although the product was the same, the customer experience wasn’t: the public didn’t pay hundreds of dollars to see him, nor were they sitting in a packed auditorium nor dressed up. The musician wasn’t on the stage. They hadn’t seen any advertising so they weren’t prepared/excited… All these made it difficult for the public to appreciate the product.

It’s safe to say that the difference between the two performances is the entire experience.  We can agree then, it’s not all about the product, but also the experience that could shape your product.

From this experiment, we’ve learned that being exceptionally good at something or selling it for the lowest price is not enough to succeed in business.

To sell a product you need to have a planned strategy. This strategy should include which platform will be used to reach the target audience. In the end, both underlined concepts are just as important as the product.

Are you selling to the right people, at the right place and time, and through the right platform?