This episode runs 29 min.
Inspired by the book, The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, David Lecours and Josh Miles discuss how key moments affect the A/E/C client and employee experience.
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Mentioned in This Episode 142: The Power of Moments
The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact book by Dan and Chip Heath
Moments and employee and client experience, CX and EX
How to identify elements common in defining moments
How to create defining moments
Moments at times of transition: first day, last day, promotion, retirement, project wins, milestones
Defining moments must be memorable and meaningful
Defining moments must be E-P-I-C
Elevation – moments than rise above the everyday
Pride – moments of achievement
Insight – moments to rewire our understanding
Connection – moments strengthened because they are shared
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Announcer: Welcome to PSM, the Professional Services Marketing podcast, it’s insight, applied.
Josh Miles: Hey David, I hear you read a good book that you want to talk about today.
David Lecours: I did, in fact, read a good book, and it’s called, The Power of Moments, by Dan and Chip Heath. I read a bunch of their books, one of which is, Made To Stick, which is one of my favorites. I look forward to talking about that book. But first, this sponsor moment.
Josh Miles: PSM show is underwritten by SMPS, whose vision is, business transformed through marketing leadership. Visit smps.org to learn more.
Announcer: This is PSM, it’s insight applied.
David Lecours: Hey Josh, before we get started on this topic, I wanted to circle back to a topic we talked about in Episode 139 on firm naming. I understand you just got a new dog, a new puppy, and I’m guessing you went through some sort of naming exercise or had to come up with a name. How did that go, and what name did you come up with?
Josh Miles: It was quite the naming process. We had a good ole family fight. We came up with all of these good ideas. Actually was, we’ve been talking about getting a French bulldog for years. It all escalated quite quickly while we were out of town a few weeks ago. He’s actually arriving on Saturday. When this episode airs, this dog will already be chewing and peeing on things in our house. Very excited to welcome Bruce Wayne Miles to the family. Of course, with the bat-like ears on the French bulldog is, it was the inspiration. We had lots of other close runners-up in the naming category. One was, the breeder had named him, the sort of the penciled in name was, Sully. Which we liked, as you know kind of the Monster’s Inc.
David Lecours: Oh, yeah.
Josh Miles: Also, the pilot Sully, [crosstalk 00:02:14] who rescued the plane, he was a Purdue grad, which April and I are grads. That was a strong runner-up, even though it was just random that she named him Sully. Then, our daughter wanted to call him Marquis De Lafayette, who is from Hamilton and French. Also, the Lafayette connections at Perdue University, coincidentally so.
David Lecours: Yeah, some deep thinking. I like it.
Josh Miles: Yeah, so Bruce it is. Bruce it is. I was like, since dada has strucken the check, dada gets the overrule, overriding vote. Bruce it is.
David Lecours: Well that’s exciting.
David Lecours: All right, so on with the show.
Josh Miles: Yeah.
Josh Miles: So about this book, this is related to customer experience through CX
David Lecours: Yeah, that’s why I thought it would probably be relative for our audience, because gosh, so many people are talking about customer or client experience CX. I should explain that the tag, or the subtitle of the book is, Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact. This book, and the concepts are relevant for client experience. They’re definitely relevant for employee experience. I would argue they’re relevant for just any sort of personal experience, right? We always want to have these impactful moments with our friends, our family, our clients, our coworkers. That’s why I thought it would be cool to talk about this.
David Lecours: What I found is that the book sort of identifies, kind of two different themes. One is, they identified elements that are common in what they call defining moments. We’ll talk a little bit more about defining moments in a minute. Then the second part is, that you can create these defining moments using some kind of key elements or a framework, that we’ll also get into. It’s encouraging that it’s not just totally random, and that we can actually have some control over creating these powerful and defining moments.
Josh Miles: What’s some, maybe good in theory, but do you think it’s realistic to be able to create memorable experiences in kind of your everyday?
David Lecours: Yeah, I don’t think that everyday is going to be this over the top kind of thing. I mean, as a bit of an adrenaline junkie, that’s hard for me to say, because I like creating amazing experiences. My wife has to remind me sometimes these projects are a bit of a grind and work can, is not going to be the super, sexy, exciting thing. We just have to get through the slow times. But I do think that defining moments can be created and we just have to be somewhat selective, right? It’s sort of the idea, if everything is at 11, then we all sort of reset and that becomes the new normal or the new baseline. Then you have to ratchet it up to 11 again, which is just highly impossible.
Josh Miles: Right.
David Lecours: What I found out from this book was that a lot of times these defining moments can happen at times of transition. I want our audience to think of, kind of key transition times. Let’s say, for the employee experience, key transition times would be things like, their first day of work, their last day of work. Which is something that often goes totally unnoticed. It’s sort of like, okay don’t let the door hit you on the rear on the way out. The reality of it is that someone may boomerang back and that person may be an eventual client someday, you never know. It really [bahoofs 00:06:01] us to have great last day moments as well. I don’t know, what are some other ones you can think of that relate to employees, Josh?
Josh Miles: Yeah, well just to echo that, I think that’s something that our organization is trying to do a much bigger, better job on, is that initial onboarding. You know, because we don’t hire, in smaller organizations you don’t hire somebody so regularly. There’s often big gaps in between onboarding. Even just keeping track of what you did the last time, and photographing the stuff on the new employee’s desk, so that you can go back and go, “Did we give them a tshirt and an ink pen, or just a coffee mug, or …”
David Lecours: Yeah, because otherwise people would be jealous. How come I didn’t get …
Josh Miles: Just to be, yeah, just to be consistent because everybody wants the full experience. I guess along the same lines as first day and last day would be, if someone makes some place to retirement age, or has a big anniversary. Those are always exciting too.
David Lecours: Yeah, and then also a transition, you wouldn’t typically think of it, but a project win is a transition. In other words, you’re sort of transitioning into this new project, or if there’s a significant marketing goal that was achieved and it’s going to move you from out of one state into the next. That would be something that you could make a great moment out of. That’s kind of more on the employee side. Then the second track of this is more on the client side. After you’ve won that project, having some kind of significant kickoff with the client.
David Lecours: One thing that I’ve started to do with my clients is to do a check-in when we start a new project, and it’s a new client, and say “Hey, what’s your sort of past baggage working with a creative agency?” Because, as we start this new relationship I don’t want any of that past baggage to cloud our new relationship. You know, if they’ve been burned in some way, then I can make a note to myself. Don’t turn things in late, or whatever it is, don’t show up to meetings thirty minutes late kind of stuff.
David Lecours: Also, within that is key meetings. There’s going to be certain project milestones that are essential. Of course, project completion is a transition. Like, topping out, when a building reaches the sort of highest point of the structural build. I think that’s something worthwhile.
David Lecours: I think you could have an anniversaries with clients too. Let’s say, you’ve worked with somebody for five years, it might be worthwhile to make a big deal out of that. It certainly would be unexpected.
David Lecours: Then the other part, most of our projects involve occupancy, in some form or another, making that a moment that’s worth celebrating. When the client actually moves into the building or a public park opens, and the public starts to occupy it.
Josh Miles: Yeah, I think related to the marketing thing or the occupancy, kind of the related thing to that from an agency or marketing perspective, would be like a big brand launch or big website launch. I think those are certainly potential for a big memorable moment.
David Lecours: Yeah, yeah.
David Lecours: Josh, when you think of defining moments what kind of comes up for you?
Josh Miles: I think about things in the past and previous roles where it’s that day, that event or that project that sticks with you. That when you look back and smile on your time there, what are those things that you look back at? The things that stick in your memory and really … For me, my pet word, has always been impact.
David Lecours: Right
Josh Miles: Those moments where I felt impact first and foremost. I think, those are the ones that stick out to me. How about you?
David Lecours: Yeah, definitely the memorable part, one of the things that the book made a real point of was, something can be memorable, but it could be memorable and not such a great experience, right? [inaudible 00:10:09] made this distinction of these two M’s, the memorable and the meaningful. Meaningful, in of course in a positive way. It has, yeah, it’s not just sort of hollow memorable, like just something that sort of shiny but is something that is meaningful tends to have an impact. Then just knowing, we can create these moments, which kind of transitions us into the next sort of part of what I wanted to talk about and how they organized the book, is they came up with this acronym of how we can create defining moments. I love the acronym, because it relevant, and it’s EPIC. You can think of epic moments.
Josh Miles: Of course, as an adrenaline junkie, you would like the EPIC acronym.
David Lecours: Yes, yes! And the southern Californian, who probably, in his youth, used the word epic a little too much. Dude! That’s epic!
David Lecours: EPIC stands for, elevation, pride, insight and connection. We’ll go through each one of those and talk about what those could mean, as a way to create a defining moment. The first one, elev-
Josh Miles: [inaudible 00:11:26] impacts the elevation thing a little bit for us. What’s that about?
David Lecours: Elevation, are moments that rise above the everyday experience. In other words, exceeding expectations. They gave this great opening example, about this hotel, in Hollywood, that had a pool and there’s this button by the pool, and if you go and push the button it triggers a waiter to come and serve you a popsicle of your choice. It’s a popsicle button. Imagine sitting by the pool, it’s hot out, and you have kids that like sweet things. I mean, I’m an adult and I like sweet things. Anyway, I can go and push this button and some guy is going to come out with a silver tray and offer me a array of popsicles. For free! Well, nothing’s free, you’re paying for the room. Anyway, I think it’s a pretty cool concept. So anyway,
Josh Miles: Is this like an unmarked button? It’s just like a blind button and you hit the thing and it closes?
David Lecours: Yeah, yeah I don’t think it’s, right, I don’t think it’s sort of like, I mean when you check in they tell you about it. But, I don’t think they make a big signage, kind of thing.
Josh Miles: It’s so random but amazing also.
David Lecours: Yeah, exactly. It just so unexpected and I think that’s the key. We’re just so inundated with so many different experiences. The idea of being able to surprise people in a good way, is really good.
David Lecours: The other part of elevation is the idea that somehow boosting sensory pleasures, if you think of the five senses. Let’s talk about the first one, which is touch. They made a note that a lot of times these defining moments happen when were wearing different clothes. If you think about, a graduation, you wear this ceremonial robe. That puts you in this mindset that this is something special. It seems like the greatest adult holiday these days, is Halloween. I think that people like it because they get to don these other costumes and they get to maybe take on an alter ego. That’s sort of a touch idea of alternate clothing, is a way to, even if it was just something sort of fun, like an everyday meeting. Yeah, maybe you wouldn’t put on an entire costume, but you could do something fun, like with funny hats or things that would, maybe people would have to take on certain roles in the meeting. As the meeting facilitator, you could come up with props that would relate to that role that you had to take on in the meeting.
David Lecours: That’s the touch part, the other way, of course is taste. If you can involve food in some way, food or drink. This is why things like holiday traditions can be real meaningful. As a lot of times, there will be ceremonial food that you only eat at that particular time like, Thanksgiving turkey or Easter … whatever you eat at Easter, chocolate bunnies.
Josh Miles: Cadbury Eggs.
David Lecours: Then sound, if you could incorporate music or some sort of sonic event.
David Lecours: Sight, would be maybe moving the location. I think sometimes, we just get so put on autopilot, when we have meetings in the same spot every time. Why not mix it up? Do an offsite meeting, rent out a table at a restaurant, or some other place that gets people thinking in a slightly new way and boosting these sensory pleasures.
Josh Miles: Yeah I was just thinking about at all of our fraternity parties or dances, we would always play Piano Man, as the last song.
David Lecours: Oh sweet!
Josh Miles: That’s a traditional thing. Now any time we hear Piano Man, it brings back all these memories or feelings.
David Lecours: Totally, yeah.
David Lecours: It’s about creating these rituals, and people like those. That’s why if you go to a sporting event and they sing the same song, or chant, or seventh inning stretch, everyone gets to chant, sing Take Me Out to the Ballgame, kind of thing. That impacts our brains and helps make things memorable.
Josh Miles: What’s next on the list? This is the P, right?
David Lecours: Right, there’s a couple other things I want to touch base real quickly, within elevation. There’s this idea of somehow raising the stakes, helps things become more memorable and defining. If there is some sort of way to gamify whatever you’re doing, and make it some sort of fun competition. Something where you level up, to make it to the next level, so you have these series of to do’s that enable you to move to the next level. I think this one, often we don’t have to do, it’s already sort of inherent, but the idea of having some sort of deadline, or pressure can help make the stakes seem higher and help your senses become more aware. That makes for a more defining moment.
Josh Miles: There’s probably a lot of marketing teams out there that could relate to that, when they had to get the proposal out or deliver things.
David Lecours: Yeah, right totally. There’s this sort of bonding thing that happens. We have gone into battle together and we got this thing done and now we can hopefully celebrate that we’re still alive.
David Lecours: To summarize, anything that breaks the norm, that’s sort of strategic surprise. For example, Southwest used to be the only airline that would do these funny regulation announcements, where they’d talk about the places to where you could exit the airplane, put on your oxygen mask first. That’s not so much of a surprise anymore, now everybody’s funny. When they did it, it really did break the norm. Anyway you can break the script helps elevate things.
David Lecours: The next up is pride, the P part of EPIC. These would be any sort of moments of achievement where any sort of recognition, gratitude. I think, as marketers we could do a better job of probably expressing gratitude to, not only our coworkers for helping us out, getting us the information we needed for the proposal. Writing hand thank you notes to clients for hiring us, and for being a great client. It’s so easy, in the digital age, to just zip off a text or an email, and that’s better than nothing for sure. But, if you take that extra step of something analog it has a meaningful, and could be a defining moment.
David Lecours: Their example in this was, it’s a defining moment when a kid, who’s in cub scouts, or boy scouts and they get a merit badge. If you’re a karate person you get a belt for achieving a certain level.
David Lecours: Maybe as you’re setting up your marketing plan, you could have things in there that, where there are little ceremonies of fun little things that could say, “Hey, you get your yellow belt, brown belt, or black belt,” or something like that.
Josh Miles: Even the digital badge thing, a certification. I’m a speaker at an event, or those kind of things.
David Lecours: Oh yeah! Oh right, exactly.
Josh Miles: It’s interesting how the badges and belts kind of correlate to the wearing different clothes. You’re not only wearing different clothes but you have a thing, you get to add to your ensemble.
David Lecours: Right, right, right
Josh Miles: To show the pride.
David Lecours: Yeah so right, at the conference you can apply those little adhesive backed ribbons to your badge to indicate that you’re a speaker, or what chapter you’re from. It suggests this idea of achievement, and I think that can be beneficial.
Josh Miles: Sometimes, those things get a little [inaudible 00:19:28]
David Lecours: It may get a little ridiculous, I know, I know. Yeah.
Josh Miles: You know who you are listeners.
David Lecours: Yeah, that’s right.
David Lecours: If you’ve got five or more ribbons attached to your conference badge, you need to just check in with yourself.
Josh Miles: If your lanyard is getting in your own way.
David Lecours: It’s dragging your head down to the floor because it’s so heavy. Right, it shouldn’t be sending you to the chiropractor.
David Lecours: All right, E-P-, now we’re on to I, insight. If you can create a moment where people, somehow they get rewired of either themselves or the world, I know the world is a large ask here. Giving somebody the ability to learn something significant, it’s some sort of education event or something where people have some sort of aha moment. Then it’s going to be, the chances of it being a defining moment are significantly greater. Any defining or aha moment’s recently, Josh?
Josh Miles: Yeah actually, I think this is worth talking about entirely separately, but I was just at a really great program yesterday, that our local chapter put on and I think we should talk about that the next time we get together. I think it [crosstalk 00:20:52]
David Lecours: All right let’s do that for the next episode. All right so we’ll tease it, that when we do our next episode together we’ll talk about that.
Josh Miles: Sounds like a deal.
David Lecours: The other thing I learned in the book about insight. In order for you to really learn, you kind of got to stretch yourself. In order to do that, sometimes you have to risk failure. The cool thing is that whether you succeed or fail, you kind of never regain that original shape. By pushing yourself, by stretching you are almost guaranteed to grown in some way. Putting yourself out there or creating a experience where people somehow go beyond their comfort zone, be vulnerable, maybe it’s some sort of fun improv game or exercise that people do, that in doing so really opens people up. You get to learn a little about them, maybe something in their personal life, but it makes them much more human and much more approachable. Also, we learn about each others and about ourselves. That can be super powerful.
Josh Miles: Maybe letting a little bit of a different of my nerdiness show, but jumping into this last season of Game of Thrones, you see that all the characters are scarred and missing fingers and they’ve been through a really rough timeline, but I think that’s what kind of looks cool. We’re not just talking physical, but when you kind of have those learnings and develop those new things that’s the really the character that forms.
David Lecours: Yeah, those lines on your face tell stories, right?
David Lecours: Okay, the final one, C. Now, that’s it for insight. We’ve talked about elevation, pride, insight, and the last one is C, connection. We’ve eluded to this earlier, but this idea that moments are definitely strengthened because we share them together. I don’t know about you Josh, but if you’ve ever had experience of seeing a movie at home, versus seeing it in the theater, and it really elevates the experience. Both, in terms of if it’s a funny movie or a suspenseful movie, there’s just something about having that collected experience that makes it that much better.
Josh Miles: Yeah, absolutely.
Josh Miles: I think, you know I’m starting to think about too, when you add the connection piece there are things that you combine together, as there that moment of elevation where there’s experience with others. Maybe, I’m stealing a point here.
David Lecours: No, no, no absolutely. There’s definitely a crossover between all of these things. When they are working together then it’s going to be even more impactful.
David Lecours: One of my takeaways in reading this book about this idea of connection is that it’s really difficult, or I should say, you really can’t deliver a great client experience without first creating a great employee experience. I’ve heard it said in that way, and even in other ways before, but that really sort of rang true to me as I was, that wasn’t something that came directly from the book but it was kind of a takeaway. It’s like you got to create this comradery and group cohesion before you can deliver a great client experience, because that’s also going to require a lot of the same skills to get along and be effective within your group to move a client through a project, because there’s just so many things that happen along the way.
Josh Miles: I think that, if listeners are interested in hearing more about that, our chat with Nicole La, earlier in the show is a good one to check out.
David Lecours: Absolutely, that was episode 109. That was a really good one.
David Lecours: This idea to create some sort of social bond that ties the group together. One of the things they said in the book was that laughter was 30 times more common in social settings than in private ones. Which makes sense because if you’re all alone and you’re just laughing out loud it’s a little awkward. Maybe there’s a way to incorporate humor in some way, whether it’s [inaudible 00:25:00] or take an improv class and learning some exercises or, I don’t know, bringing in a comedian or something that’s fun and funny, as a way to lighten things up.
Josh Miles: If you’re sitting in your room, laughing by yourself and not listening to us, because we’re hilarious.
David Lecours: They made this point that purpose isn’t just discovered, it’s cultivated. In other words, you might not know exactly why the project is significant. You just can’t sort of find it. Sometimes, you have to cultivate that and really think through and invent a little bit about why the project you’re working on has value and why it’s meaningful. Whether that’s thinking how it’s going to benefit the end user, who’s going to occupy that building, or how it may be sustainable and that’s going to help benefit the planet. It may not always be apparent, sometimes the purpose must be cultivated.
David Lecours: Then, I guess, the final thing I’ll share about this idea of connection, is something I eluded to earlier. This idea of sharing vulnerability, I’m a fan of Brene Brown and her work, and she talks about this idea of intimacy escalates with this idea of turn taking. If I open up and share something about myself, or maybe I just don’t have all the answers for something, but being candid about that up front and saying “Hey, I could use some help here,” “I think this may be the way to go but let me know and I want your opinion.” There’s this thing in our brains called mirror neurons, and what happens is basically defined as monkey see, monkey do. If I see you do something like that, I tend to want to reciprocate and then open up and share something. Turn taking creates sort of this nice upward spiral of creating this connection. Which is the final C in the EPIC.
Josh Miles: You know for fans of the Tim Ferriss show, this is a tactic that he uses all the time. It used to frustrate me that he keeps telling the same stories about himself to people he’s interviewing and often it’s something really dumb that he’s done before, and he just repeats it all the time. It totally helps that guest let their guard down. It’s kind of his go to handful of stories, that they in turn and kind respond with more personal and deep stories, that maybe you haven’t heard from someone else’s show.
David Lecours: Yeah, well you’ve heard that story before, the guest most likely hasn’t, so it’s totally effective.
Josh Miles: Which totally makes his podcast epic.
David Lecours: The good thing is there’s that 15 second advance thing, now don’t use that on our podcast, but if we’re starting to repeat ourselves you can always use that button to move forward.
Josh Miles: That’s right.
David Lecours: Yeah that’s it, it was really a powerful book and it’s timely for today. I think there’s a lot of lessons in there that we can use to try to create these defining moments. Because, really that’s what builds the brand, right? That’s what builds a career, it’s these series or string of moments strung together. I think it’s really important.
Josh Miles: Great, I’m going to have to check that out and again the book is, Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath. Is that right?
David Lecours: We’ll include a link to that in our show. No, it’s at psm.show.
Josh Miles: Well I guess that brings us about to the end of the show. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions for future shows or guests, you can write to us at psm.show, scroll down to contact us and drop us a line. That’s it for this episode of PSM show, from David Lecours and myself, Josh Miles, we’ll see you next time.