Expand Your Meaningful Experiences Toolkit to Create Time Value
Dear Friends,
I know you think you understand how value is created from experiences, but I wonder if you really do. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts on value creation, real, lasting value comes through understanding what is time well saved, time well spent, and time well invested. In this post, I hope you will find useful ideas on how to increase the value of the time customers spend with you through ‘meaningful elements’ like authenticity and ‘little things.’
In order to understand the full argument, please refer to these posts where I discuss time value and introduce the terms ‘time transactions,’ ‘happenings,’ and ‘defining moments.’
And please share this post with three people who need it!
The Meaningful Experiences Toolkit
While reflection remains one of the most important ways that companies can increase the value of time transactions, happenings, and defining moments, it’s not the only tool in the experience strategist’s toolkit. To help companies design meaning into their experiences, my colleague, Mary Putman, reviewed all of Stone Mantel’s research and conducted a broad secondary research review.
There are very few books that focus on how to create meaningful experiences, which is surprising because, as we will see, meaningful elements increase the time value of experiences. But there are many, many texts on happiness, morality, truth, and meaning making. Here’s the list that she assembled:
Literature Review As We Explored Meaningful Experiences
The Power of Moments - Chip Heath & Dan Heath
Multipliers - Liz Wizeman
The Art of Gathering - Priya Parker
Captivate - Vanessa Van Edwards
Connect - Edward M. Hallowell, M.D.
Talk Triggers - Jay Baer & Daniel Lemin
Grit - Angela Duckworth
Making Meaning - Darrel Rhea, Nathan Shedroff, & Steve Diller
Brand Hacks - Dr. Emmanuel Probst
The Speed of Trust - Stephen M.R. Covey
Two Awesome Hours - Josh Davis, Ph.D.
Authenticity - James H. Gilmore & B. Joseph Pine
Conscious Living - Gay Hendricks
Transcending the Levels of Consciousness - David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D.
Thinking in Systems - Donella H. Meadows
The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt
Most experience strategists are familiar Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments. They argue that the four most important elements of a meaningful experience are elevation, insight, pride, and connection. Surely, these are powerful elements. James Gilmore and Joe Pine argue that to trounce rivals experience providers should focus on authenticity. For some companies, they content, to be compelling and meaningful, the experience should be ‘real, real’ and for other companies to succeed the experience should be ‘fake, fake.’
Authenticity is certainly a powerful element to maintain meaning and value. And it applies to time transactions, happenings, and defining moments.
One of my favorite social scientists is Jonathan Haidt. His book, The Righteous Mind, is a seminal piece about why people intuit so differently about others and concepts. He argues that we are fundamentally ‘groupish.’ And that conversative have more moral authority constructs than liberals do. These differences in what constitutes morality play out in our politics, social interactions, and families. Haidt is also famous for his research into positive psychology and the history of happiness.
It frustrates me that CX has become a discipline for measuring loyalty—a set of activities that start with persona design and end with an uptick in an NPS score. How limiting! How reductive of the human experience! When I read the amazing literature of today’s philosophers, social scientists, and behavioralists, I’m replenished. I get excited again to design experience for people.
Think about all of the amazing elements that can be included in time transactions, happenings, and defining moments. Mary Putman lists the following in the Stone Mantel Meaningful Experiences Toolkit:
Authenticity – The rendering of experiences to make them be perceived as real
Connectivity – Creating a connection between individuals, families, and friends
Individualization – Moving beyond the we know you of personalization to the we know how to empower you by giving people more control over their experience
Intentionality – Being deliberate, purposeful, and direct toward the person’s job-to-be-done
Little Things – Finding meaning in simple things, like a walk with a friend
Novelty – Providing the unexpected in the way you help people with their job-to-be-done
Positivity – Encouraging optimism and gratitude
Presence – Being there with someone else. Being in the moment
Serendipity – Actively working to allow happy flexibility, mixed with reflection
Spark – Inspiring by creating an intense feeling of a reason to act
Systems Thinking – Supporting the deeper mechanisms that people put into place to manage their lives
Vibe – Acculturating a mood, feeling, or atmosphere that aligns with the emotional or social job to be done
Balance – The ability to control different elements of life and feel comfort from things staying in motion
Reflection – The prerequisite activity for a meaningful experience. The time and space to ponder why an experience has meaning
Helping Others – The giving and receiving of acts of kindness and the satisfaction that accompanies the acts
Modes – A mindset and set of behaviors that someone gets into temporarily, often to help them accomplish more
Milestones – A meaningful marker toward a goal that can be achieved or celebrated
Occasions – A particularly well thought out and designed ‘happening’ that is celebrated
Positive Self-talk – Improving the individual’s internal monologue and perception of self
Goals – Stated or unstated objectives that the company can help the customer accomplish
Ritual – The formal and casual ceremonies that help people connect to and better understand themselves, their culture and the people around them
Over the past five years, the crack research team at Stone Mantel has studied a subset of these design elements and their importance to time transactions, happenings, and defining moments. We started tracking people’s desires for these elements in 2018 and here are some of the highlights from the work we did.
The Little Things Matter
First, during COVID, people gravitated to little things. They found meaningful value in little things. Now, you might be saying, “Of course they did, because they couldn’t do anything else.” Except that we started the study in 2018 and they were already prioritizing little things as being more meaningful than big occasions. And even to this day, little things continues to be one of the top two elements that people want prioritized into experiences.
Helping Others Always Wins
Want to know how to ensure that an experience is meaningful to people today. It’s when they reflect on the fact that they helped someone else or they were helped by someone. And by ‘help’ we don’t mean, ‘service with a smile.’ And we don’t mean that the company showed empathy to the customer. We mean first that the customer helped someone or was helped by someone else in an act of service. Sure, it’s wonderful when an employee provides real service with empathy, but the way to create the most value out of the time spent by the customer is when the customer actually helps someone else. If how to pull that off boggles your mind, consider noticing and thanking your customers when they help others as a first step.
Having Fun in Daily Life Creates Meaning
People want to enjoy their days. They don’t want everything to be a task, a routine, or something to get done. Everyday fun is more important to living a meaningful life than big events and occasions. They want to enjoy each day. Even a little bit of fun makes them happier. And as you can see from these two charts, having a little bit of fun every day is more important to people than getting things done, feeling connected to others, or emotional comfort and joy. Why? Most likely because having a fun each day can make all of those things other things more successful.
Meaningful Experience Elements Importance Before COVID
We were surprised to see enjoying little things as being the top MX element in February of 2020. We didn’t expect it to be more important than things like making me feel more balanced in my life or refreshing, recharging or releasing stress.
Meaningful Experience Elements During COVID
Throughout the pandemic we tracked how people’s attitudes toward MX elements shifted. Little things continued to be most important but as the pandemic continued elements that involved connection with others grew rapidly.
Meaningful Experience Elements Post COVID Pandemic
In 2023, we surveyed 1500 people. For the first time, something other than little things led the way. Starved for human connection, helping others became the most important MX element.
This is the type of research that your company needs to be doing. If you want to create more value from the time that people spend with your offerings, you need to think far more broadly about what actually creates that value. Is it the elimination of friction? (Probably not.) Is it your ability to increase loyalty scores. (Definitely not. Loyalty is a byproduct of time value.)
It is the value of the time that your customers spend with you that increases your company’s worth to your customers. Do your time transactions feel like time well saved? Do your happenings feel like time well spent? And do the defining moments that you share with your customers feel like time well invested? Do you have the ability to design in ‘reflection,’ ‘little things,’ and ‘helping others’ into your time transactions, happenings, and defining moment experiences?
If you don’t, are you really creating time value for your customers?