Little tiny pieces of time…

In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, the late — and truly great — actor James Stewart summed up his craft.

He said, “What you’re doing is… you’re giving people little…little, tiny pieces of time… that they never forget.“

Obviously, some films are more successful at that quest than others. The shower scene in “Psycho“…the plane attacking Cary Grant in “North by Northwest“…DeNiro looking at himself in the mirror near the end of “Taxi Driver“…when I start listing them, I realize there are too many to count.

Yet, I wonder why we accept so much less when we deal with our customers. Perhaps, as I wrote in “ALL Business is Show Business,” the movie business realizes the more compelling the experience, more numerous are the transactions (called people buying tickets at the box office) that will occur. Somehow, we in other endeavors get it backwards…we want to create enough transactions, and sell enough widgets, so later we can, perhaps, consider all that experience stuff.

What if your very existence depended upon the experience you create for your customers?

Here’s the answer…it DOES.

Unlike a movie — that will leave theaters after a short run if it delivers an experience short of compelling — your business can hang in there and underperform. (Sometimes without the very people in the organization realizing it. I’ll bet Folger’s had no idea the potential of the coffee business until Starbucks came along.)

So…if your growth and success…and that of your organization…depends upon creating compelling experiences for customers, what should you do?

Focus on creating little, tiny pieces of time so amazing to YOUR audience that they never forget.

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