By Brent Nauer

“What is this a PF Chang’s?”

Ok, so this line is from the new “Hangover” movie. The guys walk into a monk monastery outside of Bangkok and Zach Galifianakis says, “what is this, a PF Chang’s”. A crack at the PF Chang’s customer experience: the extravagant décor, pillars and horses, origami takeout bags. If you haven’t eaten at the restaurant, in other words, it’s an experience. You can go get takeout at a Chinese restaurant, but if you want to experience Chinese food, you go to PF Chang’s.

Chinese Food Cost: $15
Chinese Food “Experience” Cost: $40

At the Wisconsin Entrepreneurs conference on Wednesday, I had the chance to meet Mark Schmitz from Zebradog (no affiliation). He reenergized the idea of driving sales through an extraordinary customer experience. A brief historical walkthrough on the evolution of the consumer and cake offered great insights into the intimate relationship between customer experience and your bottom line.
I don’t want to wreck a great story, but it all started before the industrial revolution. Cake has been around a long time! To make a cake pre-industrial era there was a lot of toil in the kitchen, but even more work was required just to obtain the simple ingredients. I imagine birthday cake was quite an experience for everyone.

Birthday Experience Cost: .39 cents

As a result of industrialization, Betty Crocker capitalized on the means of assembling the cake ingredients into a readily available box in 1952. Everything was perfect, just add water, or was it? Surprisingly the product floundered. A market research team, featuring business psychologists was brought in with surprising results:

From Finding Betty Cocker by Susan Marks:

“‘The problem, according to psychologists, was eggs. Dichter, in particular, believed that powdered eggs, often used in cake mixes, should be left out, so women could add a few fresh eggs into the batter, giving them a sense of creative contribution.’
“As a result, General Mills (who own Betty Crocker) altered their product, abandoning the powdered egg in their mixes. The requirement to add eggs at home was marketed as a benefit, conferring the quality of ‘home-made’ authenticity upon the box cake mix. (Whether using fresh eggs instead of powdered eggs actually enhanced taste was beside the point.)”

Birthday Experience Cost: $2.99

Of course as women flocked to the workplace in the following years, the next phase of the cake experience was shaped. With dual incomes and maximized schedules, consumers turned to bakeries. Spending five minutes picking up a cake for Suzie surely didn’t lend itself to “creative contribution” so they splashed “Happy Birthday Susie” on the top and called themselves the greatest parents in the world.

Birthday Experience Cost:$20.00

It should be rather obvious by now, it’s not really the evolution of cake at all, it’s the evolution of the experience! And for the grand finale Mark gives us the sticker shock of the modern birthday experience today: A catered pow-wow with a couple of inflatable bounce houses, and pony rides, but don’t worry they throw in a cake.

Birthday Experience Cost: $500

Selling an experience is nothing new, but surprisingly people aren’t doing it. Mark and his company Zebradog have founded a business on that principal. They have revamped the visual experience for corporations, professional sports venues as well as universities, including American Family Insurance(click for example), Duke Basketball, the Green Bay Packers and my alma mater: Marquette University. My mouth is watering, thinking about analyzing the value added to the bottom line of these institutions with a relatively simple focus on customer experience.  Its a great business model: Increased recruitment and retention of athletes is directly correlated with higher ticket sales and pricing. Corporations are starting to catch-up with what used to only be theater and entertainment.

It is without doubt that changes to the customer experience can also indirectly benefit an organization internally with employee satisfaction and loyalty. The compounding nature of investments in customer experience are sure to have a quick and sustainable effect on your business. Make sure you are selling an experience! When you sell the experience price is often only an afterthought.

Vivisimo, A Zebra client, is also leading discussion on the topic of Customer Experience Optimization. You can follow their discussion about customer experience on twitter with hash #cxo and Tracey Mustacchio’s blog.