In recent years, many companies have attempted to make it more fun for customers to buy their products or use their services. Walt Disney Co. is the past master of this trend, having developed ways of making every aspect of the theme-park experience fun. Of course, people expect to have fun at a Disney park, whereas other experiences — a trip to the dentist, for example — are anticipated with mild anxiety or even dread. Even a very creative or entertaining dentist would have a hard time persuading his patients to associate fun with dental work.
Most services fall between these two extremes, however. They produce neither pleasure nor pain but rather are the routine stuff of life — filling the gas tank, grabbing a quick lunch. Such activities are so neutral that people often choose the provider with little thought and forget the experience in a matter of hours.
Some sellers of neutral services want to keep things that way. They want to be so convenient and reliable that people continue to use them unthinkingly. For certain mature service businesses, however, the addition of fun could be an important differentiator. Consider the experiences of buying furniture, going to the bank and purchasing groceries. Furniture stores are often full of products but deserted by customers. Banks, open mostly at inconvenient hours, seek to reduce customer interaction... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
Become a premium subscriber today to read this and all MIT Sloan Managmeent Review articles.
Buy this article. Purchase one or more copies of this article in PDF form.
Become a premium subscriber today to read this article and the entire archive of MIT SMR articles.
Upgrade your existing subscription to premium
Sign in if you are a premium subscriber.
Do you subscribe the MIT Sloan Management Review in print? Enter the email address and password you used when ordering. Don't remember? Lookup your subscription account information
- Register for free access to recent articles and the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.
- Subscribe and read articles from the past three years online.
- Premium subscription give you access to the entire archive of articles.
