Memory vs Experience

My “new” (it is new to me) favorite website is TED.com. If you haven’t heard of it before, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. TED is like a Youtube channel for geniuses, business leaders, and gurus.

I was watching a talk recently on the difference between experience and memories. You can find a link to the video here.  The video really got me thinking about this concept from a marketing perspective. Are we selling experiences or memories?

In the video Daniel Kahneman asks the question, “If money and time were not a factor, where would you want to go on vacation?” He then asked the follow up question, “If you could not take any pictures and left with complete amnesia of the vacation, would the location or activities change?”

The point of the exercise was to determine what you value more, memories or experiences. It was his contention, that the population values memories more than experiences and we choose our vacations and other activities based on the future anticipation on memories.

This has a very interesting application to the marketing process. So much of marketing is selling an experience. We sell the thrill of driving a new sports car, or the pleasure tasting a gourmet meal. According to Daniel Kahneman we should be selling the memory of the drive, and the meal instead of the experience. We value remembering the drive, describing it to our friends and looking at the pictures of where we went. We value thinking of the great food we ate and comparing other food to it.

If this is true, marketers should develop a value proposition that focuses on the memories gained rather than experience created.