Mobilizing all your senses

One thing I find very important regarding all businesses is something you might in a dry language call marketing. And this is something that, possibly even more, applies to Free Software and Free Culture based businesses.

Sure you can offer a good product that people will want to use. Those are pretty much the basics. If you don't manage to do that you wont succeed and that's just it. But there's more that you can do. Offering a good product and/or service is just the beginning. Extending and improving it further is just evolution, but enriching the experience with creative bits that charm, enchant and make your customers feel good not just about a well working product/service, but you and your style as well.

Style. That's what we need. It is always good to have some style. Imagine it like this. Your service or product may be a great working thing that satisfies your customers, but on its own it is like a gray boring looking car. It will take you where you want to go, but you will not feel particularly charmed by it nor will you attract any looks. It doesn't have style. But if you paint it in some cool stylish looking colors with some special creative design touches the whole experience changes.

We can offer our customers a good dry service and yes they will be satisfied, but can we offer them more that dry satisfaction? Maybe we can make make it a part of their lifestyle.

It is obvious that Apple is one of the companies who understands this very well and are strongly pursuing this principle. There are some though who miss this. We don't have to be like Apple or for that matter anyone else. This is the thing about creativity, it shines most when it creates something new and unique. We have to find a way to build an unique pleasurable experience for our customers, which they will relate to us.

This can be done in any business, from web services to computer building to software development to hardware production.

We have to mobilize as many sense of our customers as possible without causing an annoyance. We have to excite them. We have to employ all media we can, from sound to moving pictures.

If our business is one based on Free Software and Free Culture we ought to have even more incentive for this charming of senses because we in fact do have something that is beyond the dry business. We have values and we have depth. We actually do care about something more. We have a cause as much as we have an urge to be succesful in business. We can combine the two into a winning combination. If we create web services based on Free Software and aimed at the Free Software community we have to make it so charming that not only will their reason want to align with our cause, but their senses and consequently emotions will support it. From the moment they touch our magic, they are entrenched, and feeling good about it, both in ther minds and in their hearts, because it is good. We are the good guys.