Successful sellers of modern products do right by customers not by selling features, but by selling solutions – not what the product itself can do, but the outcome that is produced through its use.

As such, the designers of those products and experiences focus on that which allows users to accomplish a goal – quite simply, usability. The users may press buttons or select options or hear pleasing sounds along the way, but the total outcome for her or him matters most. And the total outcome is the result of – and in direct association with – those described actions. As Zach from Chapter 17 knows, it's nice to hear a crisp sound when you complete a task; it's transformative, though, to experience the total outcome of planning and executing a complex array of tasks and projects, that is, the total outcome of being a fully independent agent. Therese Fessenden parses delight into two categories: that which is “local and contextual…and derived from largely isolated features” and that which is “holistic, and is achieved once all user needs are met.” Features in isolation may offer novelty, but they are not all encompassing. They do not change the user's relationship with his or her work. They do not change the user (Fessenden, 2017).

Sellers, leaders, trainers, and service professionals, therefore, should not just be focused on the solution (the outcome); they should be focused on how the process toward that outcome is experienced. The process – or experience – is “delightful” when the user (or customer or trainee) returns consciously or subconsciously to the process. They know the thing that pleased them and are there to seek it again. Or they don't know exactly what it was, but they remember how they felt and are happy to return to the entire experience. To put it simply, then: build toward the total experience. To put it even more simply: build the total experience.

Add Dimensions of Delight

Netflix may seem like low‐hanging fruit as an example, but its path toward a total experience is both instructive and easy to see (making it authentic and immediate, as well.) They solved a problem, mastering movement along the x‐axis; then they started to run up and down the y‐axis, adding dimensions of delight for their customers.

The story begins in the 1980s and 1990s with Hollywood movie rentals. Back then, VHS tapes were organized in a specialized store (like Blockbuster Video or West Coast Video), and as a member of the store, you could rent a movie (or two or three, depending on your membership level) for two days (or more, also depending on your membership level). You were encouraged to “be kind, and rewind” before returning the video to the store so that future viewers would not have to rewind it.

As DVDs became more ubiquitous, they replaced VHS tapes. Video games also started to become a rental option. “Be kind, rewind” became a thing of the past – a problem solved across the board for an industry by an advance in technology.

Movie rental stores were a service – a storefront where movies could be rented. They solved a range of problems for people. Consumers wanted to watch movies produced for the big screen – new releases and classics – in their homes for several known reasons: they couldn't watch them anymore in the theater, they were more comfortable watching something for the first time in their own home, and/or they did not want to commit to purchasing the movie at four to five times the cost of a rental.

Enter the video store. Going to the video store involved:

• Travel – Going to the store.
• Search – Finding the thing you were looking for or the possibility of stumbling upon something you might be interested in if you happened to walk down the right aisle, which was arranged at the discretion of the store.
• Stock – A bet that the movie you wanted to see was available at that location.
• Physical quality – The hope that the item you rented was not damaged by a previous renter.
• Accountability – The commitment to return the rental on time or pay a late fee.

None of these are dramatically painful experiences. They are inconvenient, sure, but not life‐threatening. (Remember, this isn't meant to be a lofty or even noble example – just one we can easily see.)

When Netflix's DVD‐by‐mail product became the leader of those trying to provide a DVD‐by‐mail service, it solved:

• Travel – You did not need to leave your home.
• Search – You could search for the thing you wanted online and be provided with similar suggestions.
• Stock – Netflix built several fulfillment centers in order to increase their total available stock and you could find out online if something was completely unavailable at the time with an expected availability date and an ability to reserve it in a queue.

You could handle the entire transaction on the Internet, and the DVD would show up in your mailbox.

The other inconveniences, physical quality and accountability, were still present, but Netflix kept innovating and kept adding value. When Netflix introduced streaming video services it solved the issues of:

• Travel
• Search
• Stock
• Physical quality – With online streaming, there was no longer a concern about the physical quality of the media.
• Accountability – With no physical medium to return, it was impossible to be late. The entire online catalogue, quite limited initially, was available for a subscription fee.

By this time, Netflix had effectively learned to dominate the x‐axis of video rentals. They improved on the process until it was unbeatably functional and smooth and until they were doing what Hollywood Videos and Blockbuster did – only more conveniently – for users.

Then Netflix started to climb up and down the y‐axis, adding value or delight by offering (1) recommendations to individuals based on their viewing habits (using big data in new ways), and (2) integration via their software into televisions. Eventually, they started making their own content based on what viewers liked, clicked on, and actually watched (Petraetis, 2017). This last move releases them almost entirely from the x‐axis, as they are no longer reliant entirely on outside vendors to provide them with their shippable product.

Entertainment is still not the opposite of boredom, but this doesn't mean that the business of entertainment cannot, in itself, be delightful. For those who take seriously the enjoyment of filmed stories, for those who, perhaps, build their family's Friday evenings around popcorn and a movie, Netflix has arrived like a tightrope walker on a bicycle, extending the experience beyond everyday miracles.

Offer the Private Plane, Not the Bus

Part of Netflix's success stemmed from the fact that they were able to change the habits of an entire generation of customers by adding noticeable value, and not mere novelty, on top of all the alternative ways that value could have been presented. So many customers of video stores started using Netflix (or other options resembling the Netflix model) that video stores disappeared. A report from Business Insider in July of 2018 rounded up the few remaining Blockbuster stores before they closed (Taylor, 2018). Last we heard, one store remains open in Bend, Oregon, kept afloat by nostalgia, kitsch, and the occasional quirky partnership like the one they formed with a beer company. See, or sip, The Last Blockbuster Beer: a light‐bodied black ale that is said to pair well with buttery popcorn (Zanger, 2018). (It can be argued that this store has simply found new ways to be delightful, and the canny reader might develop a blog post or article around that topic.)

The founders of Netflix changed customers' minds, but they apparently could not change the mind of Blockbuster itself when they approached the CEO about a partnership and were supposedly laughed out of the room (Sandoval, 2010). Purveyors of delight will often be in that same position – wherein they have to convince people that the value they have added, or will add, is worth an investment of time, treasure, or attention. This frequently involves overcoming resistance to change, which is something, ironically, that the founders of Netflix could not do when they approached certain decision makers at Blockbuster.

We spoke to Jaime Casap, Google Education Evangelist, who at the time of this writing, had the lucky job of spreading the word about a product that is delightful in most ways. Interestingly, though, he approached change by turning it on its head and by thinking about the way it plays out in the minds of his clients (or, if he's consulting, his clients' clients). “I don't actually believe in resistance to change,” he said at the start of our conversation. “We, as human beings, do change. We change every day, we always change, we adapt – that is what we do. We are humans. And so, I don't believe in resistance to change. I believe in resistance to pain.” (Personal statement, 2018)

He then shared an analogy with us that connects in deep ways to the ambition to create delightful products and experiences and also to lead others toward them in a manner that will help them commit to them.

Mr. Casap has flown a lot. In fact, he has been traveling constantly for 25 years. And, like any good road warrior, he has a routine, a pattern, has his “day bag, [his] three‐day bag, [his] seven‐day bag,” and knows how to pack each of them quickly. It takes him about 30 minutes to move through his home airport to his seat on whatever plane is carrying him to his destination. If air travel were video rentals in the 1980s, he could be said to have his Blockbuster game under control.

Given that metaphor, you know where this analogy goes next. He uses his comfortable base as a pivot point for his thoughts on change:

If Google said to me, “Look, you are traveling a lot, so we're going to get you a private plane that just waits for you at the airport, and whenever you need to go anywhere, you can just pick up the phone an hour before you fly and call it and it will take you wherever you want to go.” How resistant to that change do you think I would be?” Not very.

Then he posed the opposite question based on the opposite scenario: “Now, if they said to me, ‘Hey, you are traveling a lot, so from now on we need you to travel only on buses,’ then all of a sudden I would see the change.”

Seeing the change would cause rhetorical Casap, or anyone, to become resistant. Starting from his status quo – of a travel experience that did what he needed it to do – he would start to list all the ways in which the change would slow him down, cause him inconvenience, take him away from his family for additional time, and reduce his effectiveness at work. And then, these reasons would be the barrier to the change. Pain, whether real or imagined, would be in the middle of the decision like the Sphinx at the gate of an ancient Greek city state.

Oftentimes, when we are trying to help someone understand a concept or acquire new skills, we present the bus and not the private plane, and people resist, of course. Why would they want to go backwards?

When dealing with clients, Casap calls upon his insights – about how people work and also how his own life unfolds from day‐to‐day. “It's a natural tendency to focus on the bus and not the private plane,” he concludes. “When I talk to people who are doing change management, I say, ‘What's the private plane that you're presenting? If you don't have a private plane, why the hell are you changing? Why would anybody want to change?’”

Too often, even when we're selling something delightful, we hand people problems instead of solutions. Only thinking about the thing we're trying to sell leaves out one important consideration: our focus on the process toward the outcome that the product or service makes possible. Or, said another way: the value created through use and extension.

Creep alongside Your Mission

Jack White of White Stripes fame is an extraordinary guitar player. He has played with the kind of big, brash, confident style that hearkens back to the great Blues musicians while showing others what the future might sound like. What's more, his lovingly rendered Third Man Records (studio) has allowed him to entertain pursuits that seem to be more distantly related to his virtuosic, god‐like, guitar shredding (Eels, 2012). There, he has produced music for everyone from the Insane Clown Posse to a band comprised of people working for the Nashville Metropolitan Transit Authority. He has also used the company to send a vinyl record and record player into space – and it actually played.

Looking objectively at the output of Third Man studio, it's possible to wonder if White has lost his mojo or if he has created a distracting circus around himself; if, in business‐speak, a lack of discipline paired with rock star money and ego have opened his operation to mission creep.

Listening to White's comments about these pursuits makes us wonder if he has not been up to something else, though.

“I'm trying to get somewhere,” he told the New York Times. And in the same interview, he admitted that Third Man Records is, indeed, a “McGuffin,” but a highly functional one at that: “It's just a tool to propel us into the next zone.”

White continues to make music, sure, but he has located its value, and his value as a musician, outside of music itself – outside the product.

Which is ironic, because he has pulled off this feat, at certain times, by elevating the artistry around the musical product itself. At a time when music is increasingly ephemeral, because increasingly digitized, he's investing in technology that allows him to literally press and distribute actual vinyl records. He's recording musicians that he thinks are vibrant and resonant, even if unknown. He's experimenting in ways that draw attention to musical archives and oddities.

We'll never know why, exactly. But perhaps, in these endeavors, he's learning more about his audience, or he's hearing something in a collaboration that pushes his own music in a different direction. Certainly, if he keeps pushing far enough and wide enough, music and the ways in which humans receive it may never be the same. Going beyond his mission, it seems, could be just what music, or at least Jack White's music, needed.

If you squint your eyes, you'll see a business equivalent starting to take shape.

Here's Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco, speaking at a conference in 2018: “It's incumbent upon businesses to make sure we are taking an active role in creating opportunity for everyone…Increasingly, businesses are going to have to get involved in things where you can't draw a straight line to the business” (Robbins, 2018).

And here's Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson, urging companies to understand the true origins of their investment dollars:

“Bad actors” doesn't simply mean money from rulers…who turn out to be cold‐blooded killers. It also means money from regions where dictators rule viciously and restrict freedom [or] money from business interests which profit by poisoning us with opioid addiction or warm our planet with fossil fuels. (Wilson, 2018)

He then pushes his entire sector to think more deeply, with more honesty and integrity:

It is time for all of us in the startup and VC sector to do a deep dive…and ask the question that [a CEO recently] asked me. Who are our investors and can we be proud of them? And do we want to work for them? (Wilson, 2018)

There's the value in the thing itself. But, increasingly, there has to be value around the product, the service, the software, the provider.

A recent study by FleishmanHillard, a public relations and digital marketing agency, confirmed this. They describe the existing environment in which many of us do business as “zero gravity” (2018). In zero gravity, business leaders face an “issues‐laden environment that quickly tests corporate values…where every issue in the spotlight feels like a competing force.” The main question in an environment like this is, “when, and how, should you speak up” about key issues?

According to their study, more than 65% of the consumers they surveyed have often or sometimes stopped using products or services because a company's response to an issue does not support their personal views. And nearly half of consumers are not at all likely to purchase from companies who they think promise one thing but act in another way (FleishmanHillard, 2018).

But don't read those statistics the wrong way. The primary danger in holding a position or value with which your consumer does not agree is staying silent about your rationale. You won't lose all the consumers that disagree with your position or deep values.

What does any of this have to do with delight? Plenty (though perhaps we, too, are pushing past our mission at this point).

Delight, as we have noted, is not always easy. It sometimes involves trudging along a trajectory that, ultimately, adds significance, relevance, or meaning to a task, product, training, or exercise. It exists, and should be sought, because it speaks to a consumer desire – to locate elements outside of products and services themselves that complete the experience of using these products or services. You are not simply offering goods or services; you are not simply solving problems; you are also helping consumers feel good about the company behind the product or service, behind the solution. (Authenticity is always ethical: going all the way back to Aristotle's assertions, humans taking care of humans, humans teaching humans, by definition, cannot wish for something bad for one another.)

Again according to the FleishmanHillard report:“[Often] the biggest action you can take is to reveal the company's authentic reflection on [an] issue, [actively] listening and seeking potential areas of change” (FleishmanHillard, 2018).

These moves, though deeply serious, are close to what, earlier, we defined as transformative play, or in the words of Tekinbas and Zimmerman “a moment of transcendence, in which those structures we took for granted suddenly find themselves cast as players.” (Reading that, you might think of White's space‐launched record player, which both plays the music and becomes, in this case, a critical part of the way in which it is received.) They continue: “Grammar tells a joke. The ballroom floor gets up to dance. The rigid Rule becomes supple and limber and jumps into the arms of Play.” (You might think next of Cisco's CEO and his thoughts on where business needs to go.) They end: “Transformative play can metamorphosize the players of the game, the culture of which the game is a part, even the game itself (Tekinbas & Zimmerman, 2003, 605). (You might think: Delightful products and services should aspire to nothing less.)