Last Friday, I had the extreme pleasure of being a dinner guest at Boston’s Oak Room. It’s a steakhouse in the classic tradition that fusses over every detail, serves the highest quality cuisine, and charges its patrons accordingly. As dining goes, it’s fantastic. But what really got me to thinking was the overall experience — how it kept me thoroughly contented and wanting for nothing throughout the entire 2+ hour meal.
In my day-to-day work, I look at conversion rates, clickpaths, and TSL type info. It’s a statistical smorgasboard of numbers and trends that ideally convert into something profitable. But while I sat in the oak paneled dining room on Friday, I realized that we tend to dehumanize the online process to such a degree that we make less interesting products. This is no great revelation, but place this same mentality onto your music, your company, and your online presence. How do you provide an experience so profound that users/diners linger over every last morsel. Do you keep the pace and expectations equal so that the meal/user experience lasts as long as possible without feeling stretched or contrived? And, most importantly, do you provide a value/service/ribeye that is worth the time/money spent to digest it?
I might be getting a bit ridiculous here, but it all matters. I’m in the middle of copywriting a website, and we just republished a page with some informative text at the top. That text consists of a sum total of 135 words used in 14 sentences, spread over four (mostly 2-3 sentence) paragraphs. It takes about 20 seconds to read all of it — twice.
There was great concern that placing even that much text on a page is a turn off. People simply want the bullet-pointed, list driven, non-descriptive stuff that they can get to (and digest…) quickly. I understand the philosophy, and I too was concerned about the length of the text. But … as marketers are we destroying the experience in the name of a statistically desired result?
I could’ve skipped the Oak Room dinner, and gone to the Outback. Therein I’d have been been served a steak, a salad, and even a glass of wine. But it wouldn’t be the same — the presentation, the quality, the service, and the overall experience would’ve been sorely lacking. Music aficionados bemoan the death of vinyl because it signaled the end of an experience. You can’t listen to an LP while you’re on the train or sweating on the elliptical. Vinyl requires your attention, your investment, and respect for the form. Websites deserve the same. Your music deserves the same. The respect for the consumer needs to be there. More than the destination, marketers need to focus on the journey. In this results-driven, CTR/ROI/CRM/CPC mentatlity we’re sliding into, we’ve forgotten that.
Blissfully, the Oak Room hasn’t.
