What Brene´ Brown Said About Time is True for Experience Strategy Too
Chapter Five: Principle 4—Value is in Time Spent
Dear Friends,
Today we start chapter five. It’s all about time well spent. Here’s a short summary of how the chapter will play out.
Introduction
Too Many Experiences, Not Enough Time
Value from Time
Measuring for Time Value
The Meaningful Experience Toolkit
Experience Strategy and Time Value
New Strategy Skill: Time Value Creator
Today, I’ll introduce a simple but powerful framework to help you think about value creation.
What Brene´ Brown Said About Time is True for Experience Strategy Too
Time is Not a Renewable Resource
My wife and I went on our morning walk today at 6:45. She walks every day. I walk three times a week and we bike together twice a week. I try to slip in a few solo bike rides when I feel up to it. This is our pattern when we are home and we try to maintain it. When we travel it’s hard to keep our walking schedule so we walk as often as we can.
I bring up this tidbit about my life for two reasons. First, this morning Tina and were talking about Brene´ Brown. While our discussion was about something different—we both really enjoy Brene’s work—the conversation reminded me of something in particular that Brene´ shared. She said, “time is the great non-renewable resource.” Then she added, “There’s nothing worse than a meeting that doesn’t add value or serve the work.”
This chapter is about time, the most limited resource that customers have.
The second reason I shared our walking patterns is as a reminder of key things that we’ve already discussed. For example, my walking patterns are based on my situational needs. If I travel, I have to modify. Both Tina and I spend a significant amount of time each day exercising. Why? Because it improves our personal performance. We accomplish more on days that we walk, run, or bike. We value companies that support us in this meaningful endeavor. And, finally, walking is part of a larger, more systemic, more holistic job to be done. We want to get the whole well-being job done. Walking is a part.
We get a tremendous amount of value from the times when we walk together. We talk about big and little things. We set goals. We learn. We get tremendous value from our bike rides, which feel a bit more like parallel play than walking does. We both listen to spiritual podcasts, crank up music from the 80s, or enjoy focused time in reflection.
The tools we use to support these exercise experiences include Oura rings, Strava (for me), Apple Watch (for her), Hoka sneakers, airbuds, iPhones, Lululemon workout gear, sunglasses, bike helmets, slightly used bikes, and so forth. Each tool has a role to play to help make the experience as meaningful as possible. As we identify new tools that may do a better job for us, we swap out old tools, to make our experience better.
Right now, Tina’s bike is in the shop for some repair and upgrades. We hope both the repairs and the upgrades will make her faster and more in control of her experience. We, not the companies who produce the tools or services, are in control of our morning exercise. We decide what makes the experience meaningful.
We have literally thousands of solution providers to choose from to make morning walks and bike rides more meaningful. What we don’t have is more time. We have to choose whether to sleep in, go to work early, or exercise every morning. And so do you.
The most precious thing that people have is their time. It is always limited. There is never enough. And any one item that they add to their lives requires some level of attention. I like my Oura ring, but I must keep it charged, and I must remember to not have my phone on battery save mode while recording my heart rate during a bike ride. The phone and the ring won’t sync. Now that’s an incredibly specific detail that I have to pay attention to because I want to track my heartrate using my smart ring.
Time constraints are more important to decision-making than pricing, preferences, product features, or even productivity. Not that these other factors don’t play into decision-making. They very much do. But if you are wondering why people do things that don’t seem to make sense, it’s most likely because they were pressed for time, or they were multitasking to save time, or they found something more meaningful to spend their time doing.
Most companies today, spurred by a common misunderstanding of the term, focus their customer experience efforts on making things ‘convenient’ for customers. They provide a wide range of channels for people to use. They work to remove friction from the experience. They do these things because they recognize that customers don’t have a lot of time to spend.
But there is almost no value created from conveniences. Let me say that again. Has anyone ever been able to raise their prices because they made the experience more convenient? (Fast pass at Disney, you say?) The value from the experience is already baked into the experience. In the case of Disney fast pass, the theme park can charge more for faster access to the rides because there is so much demand for the rides.
Let’s take a look at another ‘convenience’: convenience stores. What is the time value proposition of a convenience store? Is it not that the customer can get snacky items quickly so that they don’t have to spend any more time than is absolutely necessary? Now, how many convenience stores are profitable without a gas station or a drug store tie in?
It’s the gas station or the drug store that creates the value for most convenience stores, not the convenience of the store. Here, ‘convenience’ is a misnomer. The stores would be more accurately described as ‘upsell’ markets.
No, conveniences don’t create value. In fact, over time conveniency features in most goods, services, and experiences actually commoditize the solution. Here’s why. What is the ultimate convenience? To not have to do the thing at all. When people spend no time whatsoever doing something, do they value it more or less? It’s always less. It’s always, always less. They forget about it. They wonder if they actually need it.
No time spent means no value created. Now, please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that experience strategists should force people to do things just to get them to spend time with the company. What I am saying is that companies tend to be simplistic in the way that they think about time. They want to eliminate friction. They want to make things convenient. But they don’t understand the relationship between time and value creation. They certainly don’t think about the relationship between time and meaningful experiences.
Thinking About ‘Time’ and ‘Meaning’
For over two decades I’ve been asking customers what makes experiences meaningful. Twenty years ago, it was all about being pampered and feeling special. Today, it’s about little things, quality time, balance, and being positive. Today we have unlimited options. That will only accelerate with intelligent technology, which will mean that people will value ‘meaningful’ experiences even more.
While the meaning of ‘meaningful’ has evolved, the primary catch phrase hasn’t. Back in 2002, Joe Pine and I were going back and forth about what was the true mark of an experience. The Experience Economy was one of the hottest business books. But many companies who wanted to be in the experience business were hamstrung. They could get their heads around a positive memory as an indicator of a great experience, but something was missing. They wanted to know what was the essential characteristic of an experience.
I spent a lot of time talking to people in their homes or places of work about meaningful experiences. Across all of the clients and customers that I was working with this one topic recurred. People wanted experiences that they felt were ‘time well spent.’
I shared this insight with Joe. He pondered it and he agreed. He then took the idea further and suggested that there are actually three different ways to think about positive time engagement: time well saved, time well spent, and time well invested. For him, they align nicely with services (time well saved), experiences (time well spent), and transformations (time well invested).
We both agree that time well spent is the true indicator that a company is creating an experience. Why? Because people always value time well save/spent/invested. Always. To maintain the value of solution over the long term, the company must learn how to create time well spent.
‘Time well spent’ is also the everyday way people talk about a ‘meaningful experience.’ It’s more than being satisfied. It engenders trust. And, for customers it’s short-hand for the three different value propositions for ‘time’ that Joe Pine so cleverly articulated: Time Well Saved, Time Well Spent, and Time Well Invested. To maintain value over time, you must be able to deliver one of these types of value.
Over the years, I have watched the CX movement chase after ‘loyalty’, ‘service’, or ‘empathy’ as experience indicators. Meanwhile, we at Stone Mantel keep interviewing people. No customer ever says that value for them is in their loyalty. And while they like service and appreciate empathy, these are not the value creators they once were.
In a general sense, here’s what they do say. Their lives are busy. They have to manage competing interests. Daily. There are many good companies out there who create quality products. They have an abundance of choices, but little time. They must orchestrate their lives to create meaning; to also create value.
We can think about how they orchestrate their lives using the following simple rubric:
When the activity is a time transaction, the customer wants time well saved
When the activity is a happening, the customer wants time well spent
When the activity is a defining moment, the customer wants time well invested
There is time value in all kinds of different activities, but companies must learn how to create the value.
Turning Time Transactions into Time Well Saved
There are a lot of activities in people’s lives today that they want to manage as time transactions. A time transaction can be a reminder, a meme, a payment, a micro-moment, or other task. We want these types of activities to be easily ‘queued’ and automated. Queues are any digital feature that allows us to put something on hold, start and stop the activity. Think if inboxes, shopping baskets, news feeds, social feeds, browser tabs, etc. What makes ‘time well saved’ different from ‘convenience’ or ‘simplicity’ is that the customer has control over how the activities fit into their time boxes. That is, the customer values the time that they spend precisely because it fits nicely into their lives. Time well saved is about managing a group of time transactions within a given time period.
Some solutions are all about time well saved. They are meaningful because the customer feels empowered to accomplish tasks they otherwise could never do in the time allotted. And while certain person-to-person interactions can still be time well saved, in the world that we live in today, most of the solutions that emphasize time well saved are virtual or digital.
Turning Happenings into Time Well Spent
There’s another set of activities that people do where automation and efficiency are not the aim. Helping a child to learn to tie a shoe; going on vacation; brainstorming a solution at work; or, relaxing while watching a movie. People get into modes, have moments, develop routines, and enjoy little things. These happenings are experiences people value and actually want to spend more time doing. Companies also love happenings. They want to design as many moments as they possibly can to get people to spend their time with their brand. The problem for customers is that there are only so many hours in the day. So they want to be able to orchestrate their happenings to maximize the quality of the time they spend with people and things that matter to them.
Happenings, like going for a walk with your wife at 6:45 in the morning, become meaningful when people can accomplish emotional or social jobs to be done. The customer wants to feel deeply or connect with others. While saving time can be a first step toward time well spent, it is not enough, the customer must actually want to spend more time with the solution.
Turning Defining Moments into Time Well Invested
The final group of activities that people like to participate in are defining moments. Defining moments are actually notmoments. They are a series of events that, when we look back on them, have changed us, either for good or not. Defining moments come in the form of milestones, ceremony, life events, crises, and moments of significance. Customers will often sign up for activities that they hope will become time well invested. Cooking classes or a Masters’ program promise time well invested.
The two elements that turn experiences into time well invested are reflection and change, thereby making them transformative experiences. The experience must change your customer in some way. And upon reflecting about the experience they find significance in the events that caused the change. Time well invested leads to future opportunities, value, and new abilities.
(If you are interested in going deep around transformation and transformative experience, check out Joe Pine’s Substack where he’s working on his new book on the subject.)
To be continued. . .