Transformational experiences
Imagine two brands: Brand A and Brand B.
Brand A has all the trappings of a successful organization: endless budget, award-winning experts on-staff, and executives who just “get it.” From the outside looking in, they feel unstoppable.
Brand B has none of those things. They aren’t winning any industry awards, they have smallish budgets, and their executives come and go. However, they have something that Brand A doesn’t have, something you can’t merely purchase: somehow, magically, they actually know each and every person in their audience. Personally!
What an advantage that would be, right? I’d rather be Brand B any day. Imagine how easy the rest of our work would be if everyone we hoped to serve with our products, services, and content felt they were actual connections of ours, in-person?
That’s what happens when someone genuinely earns your trust and your love. Your best friends don’t need to A/B test their email subject lines to you. They don’t need to “growth hack” their way into your life. You make room for them. You spend time with them. You give them the benefit of the doubt when they bring you something new or hope to start a new conversation.
We ALL want to earn trust and love with our work. (It’s not about who arrives. It’s about who stays.)
If we earn trust and love, everything else gets easier. Because of who you are and what you’ve earned, they’ll support you.
But how we typically go about this is broken.
We typically offer “transactional value” in what we create. The purpose of what we offer is to compete our time together quickly. It’s hard to develop a real relationship without the experience itself being the point, rather than completing the experience as quickly as possible. But that’s the nature of a transaction: the goal is to finish them and move on with your day.
Transactional value is a form of education or entertainment others seek in reaction to a problem they’re trying to solve as quickly as possible. The source of the value usually doesn’t matter. The commodity being exchanged can be found anywhere from anyone in the competitive set. They aren’t seeking a relationship. They’re seeking to finish the transaction.
So we can’t offer transactional value at all. The experience itself must be the point, because the experience is where we earn trust and love. Our goal is to bridge the gap between transactional value and what we should be offering instead: transformational experiences.
This is our challenge. This is our opportunity. Transformational experiences don’t just help people. They change people. When we start by scanning the market for current opportunities, we end up pandering to the status quo. But our work should make the world better, not merely play to its existing state. To do that, we can’t continue to ship commodities. We have to offer something proprietary.
In today’s world, that’s not knowledge. That’s not a feature set. That’s not a price point. These are all themselves commodified. There’s too much competition in every sense of it.
The experience itself must be our advantage.
It’s fine to focus on helping, on answering a question others want answered. But what about the questions they should be asking instead? What about the answers they need to hear, not just want to hear?
Don’t offer transactional value. Create a transformational experience. That’s how to shift the culture.
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