Tierra Lab
Buying Experiences or the $25 Pancake Breakfast
The old sales cliche of “sell the sizzle and not the steak” is, like a lot of cliches, often true. Sometimes what drives customers to buy is not about the product itself but the experience surrounding the product. Two weekends ago that point was driven home to me when my family and I repeated what has become a yearly tradition.
Here in New England the early spring means “sugaring time”. The warming days and cold nights pull the sap from the roots into the trees and then into collecting buckets and hoses all over the countryside. The huge clouds of steam boiling out of the roofs of “sugar houses” serve as a sure sign that the long winter snows will eventually melt away.
Although we are surrounded by sugar houses in the small village we live in we’ve come to love a little two room operation about an hours drive from our house. It’s a beautiful drive through the Berkshire foothills, through a smattering of small towns with their own homemade sugar house signs hoping to lure the tourists up from Connecticut and New York.
We arrived at the small rustic building in the woods with our two small kids in tow, entering through a little door directly into the heart of the sugaring operation. A gleaming stainless steel vat, fired by slabs of wood from the local sawmill, boils converting the 40 gallons or so of maple sap it takes into one gallon of pure sweet maple syrup. A crusty old New Englander is manning the operation and I’m sure answering the same four questions hour after hour, day after day. The room is filled with steam, some condensing and dripping from the wooden beams onto everyone’s heads like a warm summer rain. We put our names on the list and wait. And wait. And wait.
Eventually our name is called and we are led into the second room containing ten or so tables, filled with the faces of those we have been waiting with us in our maple sauna. After we order we wait a bit more and the food is eventually served. The food itself is unremarkable, your basic pancakes and eggs, covered in sweet syrup made just 15 feet away. We eat leisurely, thinking briefly about the folks waiting behind us while remembering our own long wait as payment. However, soon everything is gobbled up and after cleaning up the mess that always comes from the combination of two kids under four and sticky syrup we settle up and exit the warm sugar house. Spring has begun.
So what does this have to do with innovation and technology? Not much. But it does make you ask yourself – do you have a product that people are willing to drive and hour and wait for? Have people you don’t even know (and probably will never know) incorporated your service into their own tradition to mark the passage of time? What could you do to make your business authentic? How can you “sell the steam and not the syrup”?
2 Responses to “Buying Experiences or the $25 Pancake Breakfast”
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April 3rd, 2008 at 1:19 pm
love the article – beautiful!
May 8th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
great article, it gets at the heart of the paradox surrounding authentic experiences, almost as soon as one begins to define it or try to replicate it the less authentic it becomes. I recently faced this dilemma at my last company as we began to look at our own customer experiences through an “authentic lens.”