Potholes vs Peaks

by John Stacy, Executive Director, GAMA

Everyyear during the holidays, my father-in-law asks me what I do, and I tell him that I work with a nonprofit organization that supports the tabletop game industry through advocacy, education and networking. I give him some examples of what my workday is like and some of the projects we are working on. He kind of chuckles and says ok, and I know that he will ask me again the next time I see him.

This conversation got me thinking about a book called “The Power of Moments” by brothers Dan and Chip Heath. They are the New York Times bestselling authors of several books including “Made to Stick,” which I also recommend.

In “The Power of Moments,” they talk about how we engage others to create lasting and memorable moments. While this is not a review of the many interesting points they make, I want to talk about one concept and how it can change the way you approach interacting with others and may improve your business. They present a theory that life is full of potholes and peaks and how you navigate and cultivate them can have a direct impact on your life and business.

Potholes are pretty simple; they are the everyday problems and issues that occur. People tend to focus on the negative and what went wrong, rather than what went right. This is to be expected. Neurologists point out that we are hardwired to look for problems and challenges as a survival instinct. When things go right it’s just background noise. It’s when things do not go according to the script that it cements in our memory.

Many years ago, in my hometown of Columbus, we had a very large sinkhole open in the downtown area that literally swallowed a Mercedes. The car fell 20 feet down into the sewers below. Thankfully no one was hurt and everyone, except the owner of the car and the insurance company, had a laugh about that is just how bad the potholes are here. The city fixed the issue and everyone forgot about it until it happened again a few years later. This time no one was laughing, and the city instituted a largescale inspection of the roads and sewers.

When potholes occur they get patched until the next time. The goal should be to prevent them but that is not realistic in our climate with salt, ice and the freeze and frost of winter. We just live with them and try to keep up with them until they get too bad and we replace the road. The same with our businesses – we tweak and try to maintain our programs and processes until outside forces make us undertake major changes. But honestly, for the most part potholes are a way of life. People do not give roads a second thought until there is a problem.

This leads us to the second part of the equation: peaks. The Heath brothers say these are moments that are the most memorable because it is the high point of an experience. If we remember an event or moment at all, it is usually the high point (peak) and low point (pothole). If the trains run on time, we do not remember it because it is neither a high nor low, just background noise.

I had a lot of good meetings at Essen Spiel last year, but three months later I only really remember the peak (GAMA’s Saturday night reception where we hosted 200 industry professionals at the Lebanese restaurant) and the pothole (the airline losing my luggage, forcing me to buy two sets of clothes so I would have something to wear to my meetings).

According to the authors, our goal should be to fix potholes so that they are simply background noise, while focusing the majority of our time on creating memorable peak moments for our customers to focus on.

An example they use is a family vacation at Disney World. They go through all the pain points the family might experience such as parking lines, entrance lines, ride lines, food lines – I think I am sensing a pattern. They talk about the effort Disney puts into making waiting in line part of the experience on many of the rides or restaurants, so people do not complain as much about waiting an hour or more for the latest and hottest attraction. They are stimulated and engaged while in line, so it becomes part of the experience. When they get home they remember the high point of the attraction, not the tedious wait in the hot Florida sun.

We took a similar approach for Origins Game Fair last year regarding event ticket fees. The pothole we were experiencing was complaints from attendees who felt that we were nickeling and diming them with $2 event tickets for the 5,000-plus events we run at the convention. Additionally, we charged $20 for a ribbon to use the board game library at the show. We knew we were going to have to raise the badge price as our base cost to run the convention had increased. However, we were price and budget sensitive, so we looked at the data to determine what the impact would be to eliminate these fees.

Looking at the numbers we found that on average, attendees only signed up for three events over the course of the five days of the convention for a gross spend of just under $6. Keep in mind that these numbers included events ranging from $2 to premium events which could be more than $100. So quite a range. We also looked at the amount of time our team spent servicing these $2 transactions, service fees we paid for our registration platform, credit card fees, cancellations and refund costs. The result was we were netting about $1 per transaction. While it was a lot of transactions, it wasn’t a really good use of our resources and staff time.

We asked ourselves how we could make this a peak experience instead of a pothole. After crunching the numbers and talking with some event organizers, we felt if we made the base event ticket part of the badge while allowing publishers and event organizers to charge a fee for premium events, we could improve the experience and make it more affordable for attendees to try new games and perhaps spend more money in the vendor hall. History tells us that if someone demos or plays a game, they are more likely to buy it.

We increased the badge price by $10 for full show badges and $5 for daily badges while our net costs to service the events went down by eliminating the base event registration fee and the credit card fees. At the end of the day, our net revenue went up and attendees registered for 20 percent more events than before. Complaints went down and we freed up the staff to focus on other important issues. The post-convention survey from attendees was very positive, with many citing including the base tickets with the badge as a positive thing and a reason to return next year.

So next holiday, when my father-inlaw asks me what I do again, I will tell him I fix potholes and build peaks!