When Customers Work for You…

A couple weekends back I went to the Glastonbury Music Festival. It was in England. In June. In a field. It rained. It got muddy.

This is a festival with a main site area of nine square miles and a population of around 170,000. It contains 35 main stages hosting countless performers, plus a seemingly endless selection of stalls and shops, over a period of 5 days. Just a few of the headline acts this year were U2, Coldplay and Beyoncé Knowles.

I watched with interest last week as people struggled to get into and around the festival site. Groups of friends donned wellington boots and waterproof ponchos as they heaved bags, crates, tents and poles along muddy paths and across miles of farm land. There were exhausting tales of four-hour queues to get into the site, followed by yet more time trudging round and round the site trying desperately to find a spot to camp. Customers pitched tents, their hair clinging wetly to their skin, and dragged crates supermarket beer through the mud, all before sitting on a damp and dirty groundsheet and sampling their room-temperature wares.

Now, this immediately struck me as odd. After all, in this business we constantly preach the importance of making your customers’ lives as easy as possible. We tell you that they don’t want to work hard, that everything must be laid out for them, that they’re fickle people who will drop out as soon as you make it difficult. Why should Glastonbury be different?

Well we’ve hit upon a contradiction. There is such a thing as making your experience too easy, too pleasant, too… bland. If a customer doesn’t have to think at all, they will simply switch off. Any tiny difficulty will suddenly earn significance and the customer will not be engaged enough to bother with it. They’ll actually be more likely to drop out of the process than their harder-working counterparts!

Before you think I’ve gone mad, let me explain some rules…

The rules of making your customer work

1. Brand. Before your customer will work for you, he/she needs to know who you are. Glastonbury has been running for 41 years – it has an international reputation and is the UK’s largest music event of each year. Everyone’s heard of it and the core customers, the ones who attend year after year, are absolutely dedicated to it. They use it to help define their personalities. They plan their lives around it. It is even their religion. When you talk to people about why they go to Glastonbury they’ll tell you it’s “for the vibe”. Is that really something that a company can create, or is it just a customer perception created at least in part by the sense of accomplishment that follows struggling to get there?

2. Investment. The customer has to have invested in your product before they start work. The people I watched queuing up in the rain for Glastonbury had each spent around £200 ($320) on a ticket months and months before the event itself, and there were no refunds. These people had already decided that the product was worth investing in and had handed over their hard-earned cash, so their minds were set – they were going to get value from their tickets.

3. Value. And that leads us nicely onto the most important rule. The customer has to know exactly what they’re going to get at the end of this, and that it’s worth all their effort. You wouldn’t suffer through mud and rain if you weren’t going to get to see Beyoncé at the end of it. Equally, you wouldn’t fill out a lengthy web form if it wasn’t going to give you some sort of reward. If a customer has a goal in sight and they know how to reach it, then there’s no stopping them.

4. Competition. Sense has to prevail – if your competitors are offering the same thing but making it simpler to achieve, then there’s just no point in trying. You absolutely must have an edge that justifies the effort, or you’ll lose people at the first hurdle. Glastonbury works because there’s nothing in the UK comparable to it. It’s the biggest, it’s been running the longest, it books the most exciting acts. If an identical festival sprung up next door with a concierge service included in the price, we’d be telling a different story. And if your business has a twin, you must make sure yours is the easier to engage with.

The benefits

So, even if you have everything in the list above, why would you want your customers to work hard? Isn’t it still a negative thing? Well, there’s no customer more loyal than one who’s invested effort into your brand. It’s part of a cycle – if someone has gone out of their way to learn about you and your product, if they’ve spent time interacting with your brand, then they’re familiar and comfortable with it and willing to do the same again. They will overlook some mistakes, forgive little flaws. They feel a sense of accomplishment, they’ll stick with you above your competitors and they’ll spread the word to their peers. And who doesn’t want a core group of customers with that strong sense of loyalty and evangelism?

If Glastonbury wasn’t such hard work, maybe it would never have achieved such success.