I hope he (Axl Rose) doesn’t put a hit out on me (joking) but I talked a while back about how Prince made it about his audience / customers during the concert I saw in Vegas in 1999.
Thought I’d write today about the opposite experience.
The year: 2006 I believe, maybe 2007. The Concert: Guns and Roses.
The night was like any other, and the opening acts were “not too bad” as we like to say in Atlantic Canada.
But then, it happened. The open acts were done, and we waited….and WAIted….and WAITEed….and WAITED, for Axl (and team Present-Day GNR) to finally decide to take the stage.
The performance was solid, despite the original members (Slash, Duff, Izzy, Matt or Steve) obviously no longer being members of the band.
The problem, however, was the fact that most people were so mad by the idea of having to wait until after 12:00am(midnight) for the MONDAY NIGHT SHOW to start; and where most people had to work the next morning, and it just being the start of the work week, the people near our seats at least, spent the majority of their time taking glimpses at their watches.
Mind you, the 2 hour gap between the opening acts and GNR (during which time we basically just stood around, waiting) didn’t help I’m sure.
Finally, at roughly 2:30am, if I recall directly, the show finally came to a close.
Bear in mind a lot of the audience members were of the baby boomer variety, and much like myself, getting older, and also much like myself, probably not as fond of these early morning weekday shows anymore; save the later shows for Friday, Saturday, or even Thursday.
In fact, I could plainly see audience members near our seats fast asleep as the show came to a close, and it was perhaps, again if I recall correctly, the most anticipated, but perhaps least involved, encore I can remember seeing.
Bottom Line: This, lack of audience interaction, is a great example of what happens when you don’t even try to Make it about your Customer; your customer walks away with a negative memory of their (customer) experience, rather than a positive memory, and are therefore less likely to refer others, and so on.
In my case at least, this was not one of my favorite concert experiences, even though the product was just fine.
Lesson # 1 Even if your product is great, if the experience is poor, your business can still suffer.
Oh, and they (GNR) came through town again since, when I was in town, and available to go to the show, and I chose instead to stay home and watch TV (or something of that nature), despite being a major concert fan and a longtime fan of the band.
Lesson # 2 – when we try to make it about our customer (see previous Prince Concert Blog) people are more apt to refer others and spread great word of mouth (and bear in mind I wasn’t a Prince fan before the show) vs. when we make it about ourselves (see this blog), people are less likely to spread positive word of mouth even when they are fans of the product.
ps. I should mention that the highlight of the GNR concert was when Axl brought The Trailer Park Boys on stage to sing Bubbles song Liquor and Wh**es, with Bubbles, Ricky and Julian. That was truly a great experience but other than that….solid music, and yet, very close to my least favorite concert experience.
pss. Perhaps in the near future I’ll share my (positive customer) experience watching the Prince of Darkness, Ozzy, in Concert.
Chat more soon. Oh, and you can read more about our new book at http://www.tisti.ca
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