Guests are NOT looking for experiences. They’re looking for solutions.

Hospitality loves the word ‘experience’.

Hotels no longer sell rooms; they create experiences. Venues no longer hire out meeting space; they deliver experiences. Restaurants, attractions, event organisers and pretty much anyone with a reception desk will tell you they’re in the experience business.

We’re also constantly reminded that guests ‘these days’ are looking for experiences. Presumably, guests in the olden days were perfectly happy buying a bed, a plate of food and six hours in a windowless conference room.

Of course experience matters and I’m not for one minute suggesting it doesn’t. But I do think our obsession with the word lets us believe we’re being far more customer-focused and strategic than we actually are.

Because, in marketing terms, ‘creating experiences’ is just another way of talking about delivering the product…

And Product is a tactic.

Experience is part of the Product P

When hospitality businesses talk about their product, they tend to mean the physical stuff. The bedroom. The restaurant. The ballroom. The spa. The golf course. The nice view. The coffee machine. The enormous LED screen that somebody in the venue team will mention within the first four minutes of a showround.

Those are the facilities... The features.

But the Product P has never been limited to physical things. Jerome McCarthy – the inventor of the famous 4Ps – specifically said that Product includes the full offering received by the customer, meaning that the service wrapped around those facilities is part of the product too.

How easy was it to enquire? Did somebody understand what you were trying to achieve? Did they respond when they said they would? Did the event run smoothly? Did the staff make you feel welcome? Did the bedroom look like the photographs? Did somebody sort out the problem without making you repeat yourself to four different departments?

That’s the experience.

If, then, facilities are the tangible features of the product, then experience is the service through which that product is delivered.

Both matter enormously. But they’re both still part of the Product P… and Product sits in tactics.

A better experience isn’t a strategy

This matters because hospitality businesses have a habit of jumping straight to Tactics, completely ignoring Diagnosis and Strategy.

We improve the bedrooms. Redesign the menu. Add another package. Retrain the team. Change the enquiry process. Introduce a new piece of technology. Put ‘creating unforgettable experiences’ on the website.

All potentially useful things to do, but useful for whom? And to what end?

‘We want to create a better guest experience’ sounds like a strategy because it feels ambitious and customer-focused. In reality, it’s far too vague to guide much of anything.

Better in what way?

Faster? Friendlier? More luxurious? Less formal? More reassuring? More exciting? More predictable? More indulgent? More efficient?

You can’t design the right experience until you’ve decided whose experience you’re designing and what you want that experience to mean to them. And that decision comes much earlier.

It comes from segmentation, targeting and positioning.

Customers don’t buy experiences for the sake of having experiences

Clay Christensen’s Jobs to Be Done theory makes the distinction much clearer. He showed that customers don’t simply buy products. They ‘hire’ them to make progress in a particular situation: to get a job done. And that job is rarely confined to the practical function of the thing they’re buying. To put it another way, nobody wants to buy a ¼” drill bit; they need a ¼” hole!

Someone booking a meeting venue may need a room for 80 people, reliable Wi-Fi, AV equipment and lunch… Those are their functional requirements.

But the ‘job’ might be to convince the board to approve an idea. Bring a disconnected team back together. Impress an important client. Give people confidence in a new direction. Or simply organise the whole thing without anything going horribly wrong and making them look incompetent.

Likewise, somebody booking a hotel room might technically need a bed for the night. But they could be trying to escape, reconnect, celebrate, recover, feel looked after or reassure themselves that an important trip is in safe hands.

That’s the bit we should be obsessing over.

Not merely what experience we can create, but what progress the customer is trying to make and how we can help them make it. In other words, what solution are they actually looking for?

The emotional benefit is the positioning

This is where positioning gets badly misunderstood.

Positioning isn’t the strap line you add after the hotel has been built, the packages have been created and the photos have been taken. It isn’t a paragraph on the About Us page describing your passion for exceptional service and unforgettable experiences.

It’s the decision about what you want to mean to the customer.

Which need will you own? Which problem will you be the obvious answer to? Which emotional benefit should come to mind when somebody encounters your brand? That’s what should then dictate the experience.

If your positioning is built around making anxious organisers feel completely in control, the experience must remove uncertainty at every stage of their journey. Clear information. Quick answers. No unexplained handovers. No chasing. No nasty surprises.

If your hotel promises exhausted parents a genuine break, forcing them to queue at reception while their children lose patience somewhat undermines the solution.

So, the experience isn’t the strategy, it’s how the strategy turns up in real life.

Start with the solution, then design the experience

This is why the proper order of marketing matters. Diagnosis first, then Strategy, then Tactics.

Diagnosis helps you understand the market, the different needs within it and the jobs customers are trying to get done.

Strategy means deciding which customers you’re going to serve and how you want your brand to be positioned in their minds.

Only then should you move into tactics and design the product, service and experience capable of delivering that position.

This is the distinction I cover in Module 5 of my hospitality marketing Academy. Positioning isn’t something dreamed up by the communications team once all the important decisions have already been made. It’s the manifestation of the problem you solve for your customers.

Your ‘positioning’ must ooze out of every facility you provide, every service you prioritise, every process you build, every person you recruit, every partnership you choose and, yes, every experience you create.

Without it, ‘creating experiences’ becomes little more than a clichéd collection of service standards that every competitor’s website claims to provide.

So the question isn’t:

What experience can we create for our guests?

It’s:

What are they really trying to achieve, and what do we mean to them when they’re trying to achieve it?

Get that right and you won’t be manufacturing an experience for its own sake...

You’ll be providing a solution.

In the Positioning module of my Academy, I provide a couple of practical tools to help you build a meaningful position for any brand, product, or service. Find out more about the Academy.