Are you Experienced?
Jimi Hendrix was an American rock guitarist, singer, and songwriter. His career was spanned only four years. But the world didn’t listen to Jimi Hendrix, watching him on stage coaxing the fire from his guitar was an experience. “Are you experienced”was his most famous album and even his band was called “the experience.”
Why is Experience is important for brands?
“Experience” is a vital word for brands. No matter what you sell, it is all about the experience: the emotional reaction that your customers have when they use your brand. Rock star brands realize that they don’t sell products or services, they sell experiences. Experiences are one of a kind, exciting, and extremely valuable.
Let’s have a look at a few brands and what they sell as experience.
Harley Davidson Sells a Rebel lifestyle
Harley Davidson sells the ability for a forty-seven-year-old accountant to dress up in black leather, ride through small towns. It’s an experience that Harley calls the “rebel lifestyle.”
It sells the experience not only through motorcycles but also through a wealth of merchandise and accessories. Almost 5 percent of Harley- Davidson’s annual revenues come from licensing their logo for clothing and other no-motorcycle related items.
Harley-Davidson customers are relatively wealthy people who want to buy into the rebel experience, they are not criminally inclined highway pirates.
Guinness Doesn’t Sell Beer
Guinness sells the experience of getting together with friends and sharing stories and laughing. Guinness is reinforced through its explicit instructions on how the beer should be stored, served, and poured.
According to the company, it should take exactly 119.53 seconds to pour the perfect pint of draught Guinness.
That lengthy pour has become central to the brand’s marketing message:
Good things come to those who wait.
We don’t buy products; we buy the benefit of the product. We buy into the experience. That’s what motivates us to buy.
Rock star brands sell benefits. They sell experiences. They sell temporary escapes from real life and songs are the ultimate escape. Rock star brands spend very little time talking about their actual product. They spend the majority of their time talking about the benefit it brings to our life.
BMW’s experience is performance. Volvo’s experience is safety. Jeep’s experience is rugged. Each car maker knows how to satisfy its customers’ needs.
No one wants a generic brand.
Nobody wants to experience the generic. Brands that solve generic problems fail because people don’t have generic problems. People have very specific problems and want very unique and specific experiences.
The best way to fully understand what experience you provide is to do basic customer research.
There is almost always someone who can make a competing product cheaper. Generally, the brand will need to provide a different experience than just being the cheapest option in order to win.
Rock star brands that sell experiences instead of products understand the concept of brain lateralization.
The human brain is divided into two connected hemispheres. The left side of the brain is the accountant, handling things like exact mathematical calculations, literal language interpretation, and fact retrieval.
When you sell your experience and not your product, you leave the logical left brain behind and enter the brain through the free-thinking right side. Selling the experience is like a free pass into the brain.
Lesson learnt
Selling only product is not enough, the brand should sell experiences. The idea of selling your experience, not your product, seems easy enough. But when you actually sit down to determine what your brand’s true experience is the whole process gets complicated. The brand will need to provide a different experience.
