Unique moments combine to form a quality of experience that rises above cliché of the ordinary and “deja view.” A handful of uniquely compelling experiences, and the stickiness of those memories, is something we tell friends, family, and social media about. Word of mouth marketing ensues – the holy grail of all marketing.

We live in a world of “squirrel” attention spans. Unfortunately, too many communities make time their enemy. Communities think in big, broad brush strokes of small town atmosphere, quality of life, and discover us marketing puffery that takes an audience too long to determine the details, and otherwise sound and feel like everywhere else. Communities also tend to ignore the more substantive product development effort the phrasing demands.

Communities would do well by thinking of product development as experiential design. Start with better crafting of small moments. Stitch moments together into bigger experiences that form a story someone will want to tell. Most broadly, focus efforts on products that can be differentiated as a matter of putting your best foot forward in a world of tourism and investment locational choice.

Does this make you look with a new set of eyes at the often overlooked, weedy entrance, the key attraction that’s missing a wow effect, or the cookie cutter subdivisions making you look like everywhere vs. somewhere special? Are they now just isolated things, or are you connecting the dots?

How many moments, what definition of “quality” of experience, and what depth of happiness do we need to feel to create a lasting memory that compels us to tell others to go…be a part of it….have us return to that place?

The shortest answer I can find in my journeys around the world over 25 years is that we enable them as communities – by exuding joy of life in things we build and do, by knowing why our community matters, by re-committing to our own involvement in making communities great, by having communities think about EVERY thing they do – from the recreation centre to painting the slide – as a way to do it just a little different and better than other places, and by elevating our creativity to create whimsy, surprise, and emotional reaction.

Think of yourself as a movie director. Your job is to create exceptional scenes, then stitch them together to sing as a finished product. To sing, design a world of quality not quantity in everything you do:

• Work on your small set of three to five product strengths (e.g. key tourism draws, or components of your investment value proposition) and reconstruct the quality of experience from A to Z.
• Look at your physical community as if you are a visitor. Be critical, and improve the details. Working out the details is cumulative in terms of its impact on impression, and satisfaction.
• Memorability is rarely just about the geography of place. Humanity is always something being painted over top that palette. Evaluate, plan and construct around how people interpret what they are seeing and doing. Put more people in your narrative, and fewer pictures of mountains, water or trees that do little to distinguish.

Why is all of this of rising importance? Because tourism relies on power of experience. And because a growing segment of our economic existence relies on knowledge/creative/service sectors that locate in amenity communities by choice…and those choices rest on quality of place factors (see Richard Florida’s work – http://www.creativeclass.com/).

To recap, think “WOW” not “MEH.” Think more granular about experiential design. To be big, start with the small.