The Strange Psychology of Authentic Experiences

When I was playing football at Wheaton College, we had to endure 3-a-day practices during training camp and early morning conditioning sessions before class in the off season. Our coaches would torture us with battle-themed competitions and feats of endurance like Mount Ups, where players would form pairs and take turns climbing the stadium stairs with the other player on their back. The players all complained about how these things were more likely to get someone hurt than prepared to play football.

But the funny thing is that, years after we graduated and the program did away with some of these more diabolical conditioning exercises, we would lament how the younger players didn’t get the full Wheaton Football experience (and also not as tough as we were.)

Pain binds groups together, including communities that commiserate. And once you’ve got some skin in the game in the form of pain and suffering, you are less likely to walk away from your commitment. That’s part of why football coaches create crucible environments that may not have immediate practical value, but do deliver mental strength, endurance and camaraderie.

But does making something more painful or difficult make your experience more ‘real’? 

Not really. But it can feel like it to your customer’s community.

Pain Police

A hiker heading into the woods with a GPS map on their phone, bluetooth speaker clipped to their pack, an expedition-grade gore-tex weatherproof gear for their 2.5 mile hike is probably missing out on a potential connection with nature and the rewards of pushing through a challenge. But the other end of the spectrum is also missing the mark. Attempting to summit a 14er on a summer afternoon with no pack and wearing nothing but a pair of running shorts is not hard core, it’s bone headed.

So who sets the standard for the ‘right’ way to enjoy a hobby? How much pain or minimalism is the right amount? 

Keeping It Real Without Going Out of Business

That’s the rub for marketers. As a brand with a commercial interest, it’s hard to participate with authenticity without polluting the community environment. And the very act of protecting these experiences by endorsing a high bar for pain makes them less accessible, potentially reducing your effective reach and robbing others of the transformative moments that made us fall in love with these activities in the first place.

Working in marketing, I see brands struggling with this tension daily:

• How do you sell comfort and performance without selling out?
• How do you make experiences more accessible without making them feel less special?
• How do you respect tradition while embracing innovation?

With proper positioning, brands can be very clear about what their ideal customer profile looks like and, more importantly, who they don’t serve as an ideal customer. The challenge then, is to know that ideal customer community so well that you can understand that tribe’s philosophy on their shared interest, and especially the representatives that they resonate with.

This in turn can have a direct impact on the content you produce in your marketing material, the policies you adopt, and the sponsorships you commit to with organizations and influencers. There should be harmony between your brand’s attributes and what your ideal segments value as authentic. If not, you’ve got some remodeling work to do on your brand.

It’s a tricky road to navigate, especially in the Outdoor industry. Consider some of the forks in the road facing brands when it comes to pursuing an authentic experience.

• Hammock, backpacking tent, car camping, luxury yurt, cabin, premium RV: Which sleeping options can legitimately be called camping?
• Can you be considered a die hard angler if you don’t have a boat? What about relying on expensive sonar gear for targeting individual fish – does that make you more or less of a bass nut?
• What is the minimum distance trail running event where wearing $300 Nnormal Kjerags is justified? 13 miles? 26 miles? 50 miles?

Of course there are no absolute right and wrong answers. But your community will have strong opinions so you had better be prepared to listen to their (often unspoken) rules. 

Getting and Using Feedback

Make sure you’re asking your customers in your post order surveys and your private community (you are soliciting regular feedback, aren’t you?) to make sure you’ve got your finger on the pulse for relevant trending topics.

You can also be a fly on the wall at public discussion forums like Reddit or discussion boards. Use a summary tool like Gummy Search to summarize consumer sentiment from relevant subreddits. You can even use it to create a virtual persona and ask it questions in a chat-style interface. 

Once you establish a perspective on what behavior is laudable, acceptable or contemptible, brand teams need to document and communicate that to all members of your customer-facing teams, whether internal or external. This documentation does not have to be stiff guidelines and PDFs that nobody will read. It’s enough to share examples of achievements, say in a Slack thread, and debate the pros and cons of throwing the brand’s support (or rejection) of them in the comment thread.

Having regular discussions this way can help your brand get out in front of emerging trends and clarify if and how the brand will weigh in on places like social media and through influencer content. Brand managers can either clarify that the official company stance is x, y, or ‘no comment’. 

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Additional Questions to Ponder:

• What “rules” about authentic experiences are worth sticking up for and which are more flexible, when it comes to membership in your ideal community?
• How far can you push celebrating accessibility and the diversity of experience before you alienate your core users? 
• What kinds of viewpoints would cause you to pull your brand’s support from a celebrity or influencer?