The offering of experiences is the field where any business, no matter its size, can incorporate a huge amount of true innovation. You don't necessarily need a massive R&D investment to create a memorable experience, but for that, it is critical to understand who is your target consumer, so you can personalize any type of service.
Let me illustrate this with a real example of a company I have recently collaborated with: a Tattoo Removal Clinic based in Portland, OR. There were no doubts about the service to offer, but the question was: who is our consumer? After discussing this with the Clinic staff, we actually found out that there were 2 different type of customers:
1. The 'soccer mom', a 30 plus years old mother, middle class sub-urban with enough household incomes to afford investing on 'fixing a mistake' from the past (Note that I use the word mistake without any intention to judge tattoos but with the purpose of describing the thought process of that consumer).
2. The second type was the tattoo lover, a male or female who is into the tattoo culture and often needs to 'clear up' her or his canvas (skin) to add new designs to their body.
Well, if we want to personalize this service and create an extraordinary experience, the business will be very different depending on who will be our target consumer. In the first case, the soccer mom, the approach will be very 'clinical', similar to a health care experience: excellence and reliability are some of the features that should be present in every step of the process.
With the second type of consumer, we can create a very innovative experience far from a typical 'healthcare environment', and closer to an extension of the Tattoo studio with empathic staff who understand the tattoo culture, obviously, without compromising the quality of the service.
As you can see, exactly the same service with the same (laser) technology, can be staged in 2 different ways depending on the customer we are targeting.
So, when it comes to start up or reset any business, we need to first ask ourselves the following questions:
1. What are we offering: goods, services or experiences?
2. If we want to compete offering experiences, who are our consumers and how we can serve them to create memorable moments?
3. Finally and based on the answers to the first 2 questions, how will we organize our company to deliver those extraordinary experiences?
The only way to avoid the commoditization of your services is to customize them... always.
(1) Joseph Pine II, The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage, 1999
