No such thing as inauthentic experiences & coffee as a commodity, a good, a service and a experience
TEDTalks haven’t been as inspiring lately but they’re still pretty good. Joseph Pine’s was mostly modern marketing thinking and occasional over-guruing, but it’s still well-delivered and worth watching for these 2 nuggets:
There is no such thing as an inauthentic experience. Why? ‘Cause the experience happens inside of us, it’s our reaction to the events that are staged in front of us. So as long as we’re in any sense authentic human beings then every experience we have is authentic. Now there may be more or less natural or artificial stimuli for the experience but even that is a matter of degree, not kind.
And there is no such thing as a 100% natural experience. Even if you go for a walk in the proverbial woods. There’s a company that manufactured the car the delivered you to the edge of the woods. There’s a company that manufactured the shoes that you have to protect yourself from the ground of the woods. There’s a company who provides the cell phone service you have in case you get lost in the woods. All of those are man-made, artificiality brought into the woods. By you, and by the very nature of being there.
The number one thing to do when it comes to being what you say you are is to provide places for people to experience who you are.. It’s not advertising, does it? That’s why you have companies like Starbucks, right? That doesn’t advertise at all. They say ‘You want to know who we are, you have to come experience us’.And think about the economic value they have provided by that experience, right? Coffee at it’s core is, what? It’s beans, right, it’s coffee beans. You know how much coffee is worth when treated as a commodity, as a bean? 2 or 3 cents per cup, that’s what coffee is worth. But grind it, roast it, package it and put in a grocery shop shelf and now it will cost 5, 10, 15 cents when you treat it as a good. Take that same good and perform the service of actually brewing it for a customer in a corner diner, a bodega, a kiosk somewhere you get 50 cents maybe a buck per cup of coffee. But surround the brewing of that coffee with the ambiance of Starbucks, with the authentic [-seating?- cedar!] that goes inside of there and now, because of that authentic experience, you can charge 3 to 4, 5 dollars for a cup of coffe.
I also liked how he made the obvious but no less important observation that his talk very much applied to TED itself, calling it “the experience capital in the world of conferences”.
4 Comments
I think he says “authentic theater”, although that sounds like an oxymoron to me.
Interesting. I’ve thought that going into the forest is no more authentic for me than driving my car, even if I happen to leave my car at home on that day, but I didn’t think it might be because both experiences are authentic. I assumed both were inauthentic.
This got me thinking about what an experience is. I guess if it feels authentic to me, it is authentic, since I’m the one having the experience?I wish he’d elaborated on the part at the end where he says it’s good for consumers to have authentic experiences. So it’s worth it for consumers to spend the extra money on coffee from a coffee shop?
BTW, this reminds me, I’m going to BIL this year. It should be fun. One of the organizers makes Phoenix his winter home. It sounds like he and others are planning an exciting (un)conference.Ben: Yay on your going to BIL! I so almost went to the first BIL but couldn’t… How was it?
I also don’t buy that this thing they call authenticity is the thing that businesses and consumers most want or that it is even good for them.And yeah, experiences are inherently inherent, unsimulateable—no such thing as fake pain or fake join (you might afterwards judge the source of the experience and adjust the memory of the experience accordingly but that, while not unimportant, is something else).
c30: Thanks for the effort. I’m not sure about “authentic theater” either… Would be tremendously helpful if TED had transcripts for all its talks, a hardworking intern could do it in one summer—I’d happily volunteer :)Finally, after several months, the mysterious word turned out to be “cedar”. TED not only recently revamped their comment systems, they just added official English subtitles are starting a manylanguage translation campaign. http://tr.im/TEDTranslations It’s really amazing how much they get the web.