Tag: short-term

The Secret Life of Pets

Posted on by philipdodson

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This afternoon we went to watch The Secret Life of Pets, it’s personally not a film that had been at the top of my wish lists of must-see films for 2016. However, taken for what it is, it had some very amusing moments and I enjoyed the popcorn.

The cinema that we use locally is owned by Cineworld, a national chain of cinemas.

Today I observed an interesting example of experience versus a quick win.

In their wisdom, Cineworld have decided to remove all humans that sell you tickets in favour of machines, which I get, and I always purchase my tickets online and add the QR code thing to my Passbook, so they just scan my iPhone, simple.

The mistake, though, not all people want to buy online or by machine, so in order to satisfy those customers, you can now buy tickets at the popcorn and snack outlet.

The snacks are a huge money spinner for Cineworld, the eye-watering prices for water and the eye-popping price of popcorn tell you that.

Now the queues are even longer for snacks and when you want to just get some popcorn, you have to wait while a group of 8 are sorting out tickets. I observed many people just give up and walk away, I did until I realised we were early for the film, so I killed 15 minutes queueing for popcorn.

But it wasn’t a great experience and made me resent their over-inflated prices 10X more as I stood waiting for the family in front decide which row they wanted, as if there are bad rows in a cinema with a 50 foot high and 100 foot wide screen and a sound system that could be heard from several miles away.

Businesses search for cost savings and shortcuts to making more money, often in the short-term to hit annually increasing revenue targets.

Smarter businesses invest in a great experience that not only gets their customers to return more frequently and also to share the great experience with others.

That’s the thing about today’s world, it’s delivery of an exceptional experience, not short-term manipulations to satisfy internal demands from stakeholders to make a quick buck.

Always play the long game and invest on experiences that your customers will share.

Keep going

Posted on by philipdodson

Some days you feel that all the effort and hard work is not paying off, a couple things don’t go your way, you seem to hit all the red lights, the train is delayed and so on.

It happens like this in life sometimes, however, we are programmed to think that this is all part of some catastrophe and it only reaffirms the ‘truths’ we tell ourselves. An almost ‘see I told you, I knew you’d fail’ and other such pessimistic responses in our heads occur or even from those around us. We are conditioned to think that worst will happen from an early age in life.

The truth is, the world isn’t against us, people aren’t against us, and some days, shit happens. But 99.999999% of the time it is shit that we can deal with, that passes and often it teaches us to improve, remodel and get further ahead on our journey.

However, if we spent more of our time recognising the great things that happen every day, then we’d notice the ‘hiccups’ a lot less.

The truth is, stick with the plan, keep going. Rovio, you might not have heard of them if they’d quit, were a struggling gaming app developer in Finland. 5 years in they thought this isn’t going well, but someone started to sketch some Angry Birds, and 2 years later more than a billion people had downloaded the app.

There’s always the instant gratification route of the modern business culture, that says ‘fail fast’, ‘pivot’ and move on. Society often does not encourage patience as dissatisfaction feeds consumption and that makes money.

But the truth is, often the best things in life or business, happen to ones who persevere, who keep going, no matter what comes up. Show some patience, bad days pass and are rarely as bad as they seem.

Always stay true to what you believe.