🔎 Is Your Differentiator Experienced, or Just Noticed?
Word of mouth remains the best way to grow any business.
But as I wrote about in Talk Triggers, you have to create viral conversation with intention.
The big mistake most businesses make is assuming that competency will create conversation. It doesn't.
People don't talk about good, we talk about the unexpected.
This is why it is critical that any differentiator in your business be experienced, not
just noticed.
I was at the Ritz Carlton in Cleveland last week, for a 3-day meeting with a mastermind group of professional speakers.
Lovely property, including a bowl of perfect green apples near the elevator.
🍏🍏🍏 On the last day, I asked my 20 colleagues if any of them had noticed the apples.
Most had.
Did any of them eat the apples?
No.
Would any of them tell a story to someone else about those apples?
Definitely no.
The apples are something that simply EXISTS. And that doesn't create stories.
Instead, you must design something that OCCURS. Stories are built from experiences, not bullet points.
🍪 Contrast the bowl of apples with the
famous chocolate chip cookie at DoubleTree hotels.
It's a piping hot cookie, baked onsite, that is physically handed to the guest at check-in. It cannot be avoided or ignored. It is experienced.
And that makes all the difference in word of mouth.
📣 In the research for Talk Triggers,
we found that ~ 30% of DoubleTree guest tell someone else a story about that cookie. And pre-pandemic they were handing out ~ 75,000 cookies each day, globally.
That's 25,000 stories every 24 hours, based on a
COOKIE.
Is a cookie inherently better than an apple? That's a question for your dietician, but the way the cookie is deployed is much better than a bowl of apples passively being....apples.
If you want your customers to talk about you - and you do - give them a story to tell.
But it needs to be something that OCCURS, not simply something that EXISTS.
📗 The Books Report
"Who is your favorite author?" I was asked last week.
