The power of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark’ is the breadth of the information it synthesizes and the depth of the insights and observations it provides along the way. Chapter 3 is a showcase, running through the entire history of commerce (in just four page) and bookending it with insightful views on how consumers experiences shape their buying processes.

Experience is certainly a buzzword these days, but the concept often sounds empty or like just another hype-driven fad. Here its meaning is applied more literally with a breakdown of our total consumer experience as a combination of our product experience, our buying experience, and the 3rd party information we gather about our product along the way (to the degree these impact our perceptions). If I buy something and love it, but went through hell to get it, that weight remains. If I buy something great easily and along the way learned that most other people who have it really love it, that helps me feel even better about it and that impact lingers.

So if I’m selling something, I should really care about and manage all three aspects of the experience – product, process, word-of-mouth. How many manufacturers and retailers really consider and put time and energy into all three of these? How many measure and reflect on their impact on sales and lifetime value? Not many. What if they did? This isn’t an easy problem, many products have horrible sales channels and the manufacturers have seemingly given up on them. Frequently of course, the internet itself is the chance to change the buying experience, because it’s so much easier to have deep product information, allow users and experts to share data and support each other, etc. It’s also allows word-of-mouth to be tracked and measured, and to some degree influenced, much more easily than in the offline world. This topic should be a book in itself.

Another huge idea tossed off in just a sentence is that confidence is what really needs to be established in order to close a sale. Jeffrey once explained this to me suggesting that I think about something that I had initially shopped for and not purchased, but later decided to buy. What was the difference between the two efforts? In the latter I had achieved sufficient confidence – in all the aspects of the purchase which might include the item, the seller, the financial terms, the alternatives and required accessories, etc. This begs the question of what could the initial seller have done to provide me with the confidence that would have triggered the sale? The broad answer is that they could have thought about all the items a buyer like me would need to be confident about before committing and provided a deliberate effort to ‘get me there’ on all of those issues.

Once they show how friction has been removed in the buying process through the years, the current state of the ‘experience economy’ is revisited. The culmination of centuries of progress in selling is less selling friction, which leaves the buyer’s needs as paramount. The observation is made that ‘buyers crave information.. but sellers remain stingy’. Then comes another very important statement:

Publishing all the information the customer needs to feel confident presents unlimited opportunities for resolving the friction that prevents buying.

When working on some of the first online stores nearly a decade ago, our basic sales pitch was that the internet would free marketers from the picture-price-paragraph limitations of paper catalogs (and the know-nothing retail sales people of the world). But even today a great many online sellers offer exactly no more information than that, and very few really aggregate everything an information hungry buyer needs to get them comfortable (ie confident). Unlimited opportunities indeed.

The final point is one we’ve heard before but I personally lacked the confidence to buy before – that the whole experience bundle is what now dictates success or failure, not just the product or service itself. This chapter sold me by defining experience so clearly up front and then marching through the ways friction has been removed to leave buyer-side issues as the major remaining barriers in most purchase decisions.

Sellers who want to use this insight to restructure how they compete for customers - and hopefully that includes everyone reading the book - are reminded that experience is a subjective accomplishment. I take this to mean that this won’t necessarily be easy and that there won’t be a universal solution. It’s also a continuum, with ongoing improvement a much more realistic goal than perfection.

Three chapters in and we’ve been shown how and why the people, processes and goals of marketing have changed. OK, time to start thinking about how we need to change. That’s what’s next.

:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here. Reader comments are highly desired.