Everything communicates.
Even Ketchup.
Ketchup. At fast food restaurants, it comes in those annoying little sealed packs. You know, the ones that you open with your teeth while going 75. Spit out the plastic end and pray that you don’t unleash a pressurized ketchup stream, seemingly laser guided to land on your pants on the way to that important sales meeting. Well, if you are a fast food marketer, this represents an interesting dilemma, one that I recently discussed with a market researcher in the industry. The researcher knows that people hate those ketchup packs. She knows that her company could provide ketchup in easy open tubs that perch elegantly in the fry sleeve. But her company won’t do it. Why? Because according to ROI analysis the minor extra cost, simply can’t be justified.
Here’s the problem that line of logic. As users, we don’t determine benefit based on parts. When we choose to go to a fast food restaurant or to buy the fries, we think about the whole. I like going there or I don’t. Sure certain parts stand out, but in an experience everything communicates.
My favorite example of this is Avis. Avis benchmarks their customer experience against rivals at regular intervals in mind numbing detail. One of the dozens of questions they ask, “How clean was you car when you picked it up?” Try as they might Avis could not beat Hertz on car cleanliness. They pounded away at the metric: power washer, armor all, turtle wax, even an occasional chamois rub down. But no dice. The metric hovered at 93.
A manager in Missouri grew tired of the stack of car seats thrown carelessly in the backroom. She decided to wrap them in little bags and place them behind the counter where people pick up and drop off cars. Oddly, car cleanliness scores rose.
Why?
Human beings tend to be associative creatures. Little things gives us clues (right or wrong) about the whole. In other words, we infer greater truths from minor details. Dirty bathrooms, the food stinks. Styrofoam cups. Must be bad coffee. Cheap packaging. The products no good.
So how do we know what details matter because we must set some boundaries? I think the answer here is a core set of rules/heuristics that experience makers use to determine right from wrong. Here’s a good rule for fast food: we should have a strong bias to making in-car dining (oxymoron) easy and accident-free. We should be willing to invest in things major and minor that deliver on this rule. Even if, sometimes, they don’t put a few extra pennies directly in our pockets.