Priceless: Turning Ordinary Products into Extraordinary Experiences

By Diana Lasalle and Terry A. Britton

A tactical guide to enhancing any product or service with value-adding experiences Shows the value of creating extraordinary customer experiences and offers ways to implement experience-based marketing strategies. Valuable addition to the literature: Picks up where The Experience Economy leaves off by taking experience out of the classroom and into the trenches. Tactical approach: Offers valuable frameworks to help readers understand how they can create a better experience for their customers and add value to their products. For example, the Experience Engagement Process provides companies with a system to evaluate how well their offering aligns with customer expectations, and the Four Components of Experience presents building blocks for creating an experience-focused marketing strategy.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 157851746X
• ISBN13: 9781578517466
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 0.8" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Excellent framework

Priceless presents a framework that can be effectively used to analyze any business - i.e. look at the entire experience of interacting with that business from the customer's point of view. Simple you say? Well, yes. The greatest insights always are. But what sets this book apart is that it not only gives you a powerful lens through which to view the world, it also gives you step by step instructions on how to use it and tons of examples. Every time I interact with a business now, I find myself wishing they had read this book.

Everyone in business should read this book

Everyone talks about experience, but few have been able to explain how to create customer experiences that make a difference to the bottom line. LaSalle and Britton have solved the mystery. The secret, according to them is well defined and communicated value surrounded by exceptional experiences. They make their case with clearly explained and supported theory and then follow it up with elegant frameworks to both determine value and identify and score each customer experience. Unlike many business books, it's easy to see how what they present can actually work in the real world. If I were to find fault with the book, I'd have to say there is a marked lack of negative examples and sometimes failure is a powerful teacher. It is also a puzzle to me why it is promoted as a marketing book when it clearly has strategic value far beyond marketing. Regardless of these minor flaws, I think Priceless has value for all areas of business, and to quote Donald O. Clifton, Chairman of Gallup International from the book jacket "Ours will not only be a more productive world, but also a better one for those who take these tools to heart and apply them. I wish everyone would read Priceless." I agree.

The Holograph of Value

MasterCard commercials effectively dramatize a distinction between the cost and the value of human experience. In essence, this is what LaSalle and Britton have in mind when explaining in their brilliant book how to turn ?ordinary products into extraordinary experiences? for consumers. They organize their material within two separate but related sections: in the first, they examine the interaction of customers, value, and experience; in the second, they explain how almost any company can prosper in what James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II characterize as ?the experience economy,? in their book so entitled. But HOW? By offering a product or service which, according to LaSalle and Britton, fills a consumer?s need for freedom, adventure, and a sense of well-being. My own rather extensive background includes market research on what consumers value most. Those surveyed ranked ?feeling appreciated,? ETDBW (i.e. easy to do business with), and enjoying the experience were ranked highest. Those responses are consistent with what LaSalle and Britton have learned. What astonishes me (and perhaps them as well) is that only recently has the importance of sensory experience been recognized, relative to purchase decisions and to consumer perceptions of those from whom their purchases are made. Bernd Schmitt and Alex Simonson?s Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel,, Think, Act, and Relate to Your Company and Brands was first published in 1999. In it, they examine a number of different companies (e.g. Nokia, Procter & Gamble, Apple Computer, Volkswagen, Siemens, Martha Stewart Living, and SONY) which demonstrate the fundamental principles of what they call ?experiential marketing.? They were praised as pioneer thinkers (which I certainly do not dispute) when, in Part Two of their book, they focus on what they call Strategic Experiential Modules (SEMs), each of which has its own distinct structures and principles which must be understood by each manager. SEMs include sensory experiences (SENSE), affective experiences (FEEL), creative cognitive experiences (THINK), physical experiences and entire lifestyles (ACT), and social-identity experiences (RELATE). Schmitt and examine each, explaining how to achieve the effective integration of all four. LaSalle and Britton share my high regard for Gilmore and Pine as well as for Schmitt and Simonson (among others) but break critically important new ground in Priceless by providing a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective system by which almost any company can increase and enhance the appeal of almost any product or service. More specifically, LaSalle and Britton identify and then explain a series of interdependent components throughout Chapters 1-6 which comprise what they call the ?Priceless Roadmap.? By the end of their book, they have enabled their reader to understand the relationship between value and experience (including emotional as well as sensory experience) by showing the link be

A must read for anyone in business!

This is the most valuable business book I've read in years. There have been books on value and books on experience, but this is the first one that connects the dots. What's more it's understandable. I'm giving Priceless to all my marketing clients so they can better understand the recommendations I make and hopefully they'll put the customer-centric concepts to work in other areas of their companies.

Entertaining and Informative

Unlike most books that stretch out one idea for 200-300 pages, every chapter in Priceless provides powerful tools that you can take away and use to improve the customer experience. This is a must read book for any company that wants to move their product or service from ordinary to extraordinary. It is both an informative and enjoyable read with real life examples of companies that have put these principles in action.