The Confidence Economy
In an overloaded world, good (or at least sufficient) alternatives are available everywhere. Therefore, the successes are the ones that make people “feel good.”
That’s a tricky target — feeling good — but it’s one everyone is aiming for. It used to stop at the customer experience, but it’s extending to be much more than that, something far more fundamental and user-centered.
A restaurant that cooks with only locally-grown food is one example. Linux as an open-source platform is another. They both bring their own classes of limitations but they are overlooked because the end result is that the user or customer feels good about what it is or what it does.
Last 100 got a tour of the latest happenings with Android, but summarized their long blog post with a “So what?” The end-experience bar has been set extremely high these days, and despite the various back-end bonuses to the platform, there still wasn’t an element to it that made the reviewer, at the end of the day, feel any better about Android than the devices currently available today. It’s a bit early to call this one, but it’s worth looking into, considering how immediate the reaction was to the first iPhone announcements.
I was told an anecdote about Disney’s strategy behind their parks in a meeting the other day, and it has to do with letting staff do whatever they need to do to have people leave feeling good about their visit and being confident that their subsequent visits will be just as good. This leads immediately to word-of-mouth referrals, the “you gotta go here” phone calls, because they don’t need to second-guess their recommendations.
So again, this is not a new idea — in fact, many people have defined what’s going on today as a Trust Economy. But I think this leaves out consumers. This works great for communication and business relationships, but doesn’t define a whole lot about products or how a business sells in the marketplace. Trust is internal, and speaks to integrity and intentions, while Confidence is applied and speaks to experiences. It speaks to the empowerment that the users feel during or afterwards a transaction with your business, your products, etc.
I don’t entirely trust Google, or even Apple now that they have made such a tight partnership with AT&T in the states, but I am confident that I will have a good experience with their products. When I go and try to do a task that I’ve never tried before, I’m confident I will find the command easily and that the process will not be complicated. With the Linux example above, I wouldn’t trust that a Linux programmer would release an app that did everything I needed it to, but with the open-source license, I would feel confident that I could patch or fork the project with the code I needed it to have.
When I took a break from the Internet Tablets, it wasn’t that I didn’t trust the vision that Nokia has around the platform, it was that I didn’t have confidence that they could mature the product in time. When I used it, I didn’t feel like I would be able to get things done as easily or as quickly as they could be done. That’s Expectation at work, and those expectations are based on best-practices in the market today. (Edit: I just remembered Dave Winer’s experiences with the device is a good sample of that.)
Did I trust the device? Naturally. I was sure my data was safe, that it was well built, that its engineering was top grade… when I researched and analyzed it. However, my immediate experiences with it just didn’t match that.
We can always overlook a minor trust issue when we know the product delivers.
Trust remains vital in interpersonal relationships, but participation in functional systems like the economy or politics is no longer a matter of personal relations, it requires confidence, but not trust.” — Niklas Luhmann
What is your product doing that inspires confidence for its users?
