After a brief break from this email (I got married!), we're back again! Thanks for your patience and I hope you enjoy this mini-email.

How to cheat to get your customers happy

I recently came across this video by an advertising executive at Ogilvy (the ad agency). In this video, Rory Sutherland tells a compelling case of why we should cheat our customers into feeling happy about our product.

It's not really cheating as such, but it felt like cheating at the time when I heard about it.

Rory suggests we can often get better results in terms of customer happiness by not improving the product at all (the objective experience). But instead we should look at increasing the positive emotions a customer feels about the product (the subjective experience). In fact, improving the subjective experience of a product or service often is better and cheaper than improving the objective experience of said product or service.

What do I mean by objective and subjective experience?

Here are my definitions:

For example, does the coffee machine brew a cup of coffee that is hot enough (measured objectively)? Does it leave coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup?

Mostly, the objective experience boils down to the end result. And not so much on the journey that the user experienced to get to the end result.

Compare this to the subjective experience:

Using the example of the coffee machine, did the coffee machine let you watch the coffee being made. Did it make you feel like you were an artisan? The subjective experience encapsulates how you feel at the end. The end product/service is still important, but so is how you got to the end product.

Improving the subjective experience may be cheaper

Especially in technology, the best computer is often not the most technically advanced or the fastest at booting up. The car that can get from 0 to 60 mph the quickest is also not necessarily the one that people buy.

Usability is much more important on a computer because not all of us are technically gifted. In car terms, perhaps the one that is the most fun to drive is a 'better product'.

Often these subjective experience improvements is what gives humans pleasure and therefore turns into a major selling point. Plus subjective experience improvements are usually much cheaper than being at the cutting edge of the next technological advancement.

See how you can apply subjective experiences to your business

Do you have a loading screen? Rather than making loading faster, maybe you can tell your customers a joke whilst they are waiting.

Or perhaps the mouse cursor turns into a fun animal that runs when you move the mouse?

The fun thing about these is that they need to elevate and make the whole experience more enjoyable. They don't necessarily need to make sense.

Have a watch of Rory's video below:

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