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It seems that taking my friend car shopping last week has put me in the car buying mood. Today, I found myself at Saturn of Medford again, enjoying another positive and exemplary consumer experience. Since I barely even scraped the surface of the topic last week, I thought it would be worth spending some more time talking about the positive consumer experience.
Why? Because I’m a champion for small businesses and small business owners everywhere, and because one area where small businesses can engineer significant competitive advantages is in the area of the consumer experience. What is the consumer experience? An experience is something that people feel or perceive, that alters the way they think, feel, or relate. What I refer to as the “consumer experience” is the result of the interactions consumers have with a particular commercial enterprise that shape the way those consumers think, feel, or relate.
What makes this a very interesting topic from a marketing perspective is that people are far more likely to remember an experience they had than they are a thirty second ad they saw on television. People are also far more likely to talk about or share an experience they had than they are to talk about or share an ad they saw somewhere. Even more relevant is the fact that people are ten times more likely to talk about a negative experience they’ve had than they are to talk about a positive experience.
There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of people who know more about this particular subject than I do, but I have the advantage of being a consumer with a rare level of experiential awareness. I notice the details that many people overlook. I notice a lot of physical characteristics of the environment that other people are unaware of. The dust, for instance. The plant life. The furniture and how it’s arranged. The freshness or staleness of physical space. The paint on the walls and all the colors within my frame of view. The things that stand out and grab my attention. The things that don’t.
I also notice a great deal about how people interact with each other. I notice how people appear to feel. I notice how they move. I notice whether they exhibit enthusiasm or lethargy, self-expression or self-containment, commitment to an outcome or attachment to a result. All of this affects my experience as a consumer, whether I’m aware of it or not. All of this affects every consumer’s experience, whether they’re aware of it or not.
One reason why small businesses can use this concept to their advantage is because of the role that organizational culture plays in determining the consumer experience. The consumer experience is more manageable in smaller organizations because the culture tends to be more malleable, which makes it easier to bring about positive changes in the organizational environment that in turn help generate a positive consumer experience.
If that seems a little convoluted, it’s not really. The point is that small businesses have more control than their larger competitors over the consumer experience they generate, which gives them a distinct advantage in the marketplace. The key for small business owners is to invest in the creation of a positive, compelling and extraordinary company culture, and to engineer a desirable consumer experience that flows naturally out of that culture.
So what can small businesses learn from Saturn?
Lesson #1
Invest in long-term relationships with your customers. Sales will follow as a natural result. Create a relationship culture instead of a sales culture.
Lesson #2
Listen to and respect your customer’s point of view. This is different than “the customer is always right”. People don’t like being patronized. They like being listened to and understood.
Lesson #3
Be honest. Assume that all people can tell when they’re being lied to. People value a trusted source of information.
Lesson #4
Know your facts. Know everything about your product or service. Unanswered questions leave doubts in the customer’s mind.
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