Are Meaningful Experiences the Antidote for Anxiety?

In 2019/20, Stone Mantel launched the Meaningful Experience Collaborative. Building off of the success of the Digital Consumer Collaborative program which ran for seven years, Stone Mantel launched the MX Collaborative to address a key business challenge companies were facing: how to take customer experience to the next level.

And so, in 2019 our research team fanned out around the country meeting with families, couples, and individuals in their homes to talk with them about what made experiences meaningful for them. We spent hours with each person, getting to know them and their children. We listened to them describe their lives and the challenges they face. Life is complex for consumers today. All of the really good experiences they’re having aren’t really changing the complexity. In fact, they feel more pressure precisely because they have so many choices of goods, services, and experiences.

The more we talked, the deeper the conversation went. The deeper the conversation went, the more likely the participants in our study were to describe their feelings. They reported being lonely, anxious, and out of balance. They said that when they think of meaningful experiences they hope that MX can be an antidote for these and other feelings of disconnectedness.

With more companies focusing on creating better customer experiences, one might wonder: is there any relationship between the type of experiences that people have and their sense of anxiety and loneliness? And does the company have any role to play in strengthening people? These are the types of difficult questions that we are exploring in the MX Collaborative. When do people want deeper support from brands and experiences? When don’t they? Do you have permission to address their loneliness? Can you create meaningful experiences that eliminate anxiety? And if you do, will they find value in those experiences.

Addressing negative emotions are only one of the topics that we are exploring in the program, but it illustrates the type of work we have set out for ourselves. Instead of hanging your hat on a somewhat higher NPS score, you might want to go deeper into the need states of your customer today. Their reality is very different from the customer that you talked to 10 years ago. They are under more stress. They care about different things. They’ve come to expect really good experiences and they don’t frankly think most brands are all that important to their lives. They’re in a different place.

We were frankly surprised that consumers felt so strongly about meaningful experiences. They see them as the reason for work, play, and relationships. They want meaningful experiences as an antidote to stress, anxiety, and feelings of loneliness. They don’t believe that most companies know this about them or can really help. Perhaps they are right. But we don’t think so. And we have the case studies to prove it.