Luxury Experience - Do You Remember When?

Do you remember when marketing was about the moment? When it was about the customer? When it was about the experience? Well, I recently attended a rock concert by Stevie Nicks and her intro song was a cover of the 1973 Led Zeppelin song, Rock and Roll, but in the background Stevie had images flashing of the golden age of rock and roll. They were not just images; they were stories within stories of a time when the moment, the audience, and the experience were raw, natural, and inescapable.

As I watched the images flash across the screen, you could envision the raw energy of the event, the transformation of an outdoor stadium or indoor arena into a venue for a rock and roll concert. You could see behind the images to the people waiting in anticipation to enter the venue to see their favorite band play for them, and a few other thousand guests. In some cases, this may have been a person's first concert, and thus their anticipation was heightened to a state frenzy as they tried to imagine festival seating and rushing into the arena to try to get to the front of the stage to those first few feet of grass where they could stand and shout to their band. The unique component of the event was that the energy was not singular in nature, as it grew and multiplied from the energy of the thousands who were also attending the event, and who were looking to secure those coveted first few feet in front of the stage.

As I sat in my specific seat, row, and section in the specially built concert hall, along with the other thousands in the audience who had found their specific seat, row, and section, my mind wandered back to a time when the moment was raw, full of energy, and the experience held so much more.

Today's marketing has lost that moment of raw energy as companies run out similar programs to a controlled audience sitting in the comfort of their house or office accessing the Internet to engage a product or service. The ability to capture a unique moment, where the anticipation is at its highest just does not exist, and for that, we have ourselves to blame.

So, how do we create marketing that can draw upon the uniqueness of a moment? The answer lies in the experience that we create and that we deliver. The experience is the single most unique and important component where we have the opportunity to engage a customer one-on-one. We may not have the ability to feed off thousands of other's energy, but we can engage the customer and deliver the experience that they had been anticipating in a manner that creates a lasting memory.

In many cases, today's marketing is built on the delivery, not on the engagement. We post pictures to our favorite social media site hoping that our customers will come to look. We tweet messages hoping that someone is out there actually "listening." We create a website or blog, hoping that people will come. We have to move beyond the delivery and focus in on the engagement and the experience that the customer will have once we get them. This is not about numbers and saying we have 5000 likes or 1000 followers, this is about the one-on-one result.

We need to pay attention to what happens the moment that we engage the customer, and are we delivering the experience they were looking for. We cannot turn back the clock, nor do we want to, but we need to channel our energy not on the delivery, but on the one-on-one engagement.

When you create your marketing plan or program, make sure you look at what you want to happen once you deliver your message, and are you creating sparks of energy across your customer base. If you think that sparks of energy across the Internet become viral communications, then maybe, just maybe, we can turn back the clock to a time when the raw energy of the audience fueled the event's lasting experience.

If you would like to learn more about our services, please visit Luxury Experience Company (www.L-E-Company.com) to see how we can make a marketing difference for your company.