Topic of the week - Dream Society

Basing on a comment heard from one of the most important investigators in Spain I discovered Rolf Jensen and his Dream Society. The comment was a question: how are the touristic sectors innovating? Traditionally, in industrial sectors, innovation is the result of more or less clever ideas perfectioned by hours of problem solving. It's about things, so it's more or less easy: just a matter of time.

What happens in touristic sectors? The type of product we have is about people's feelings, their emotions, so it is not a matter of time any more, it is about creating new emotions, at that precise moment, through not so direct means (no mahines, no screw-drivers, no computers neither schemas, only people interacting at last).

I read something about Dream Society and my friend Bel Llodrà gave me the reference on Rolf Jensen (www.dreamcompany.dk), the ideologist. I thought I had discovered the panazea of what I had thought till that moment, the maximum component. I read the articles coming up the web page and I read The Dream Society (1999), the book.

The main thesis Jensen presents is that people historically have passed through several phases of needs coverance: hunters and gatherers, agriculture implementation, industrial revolution, society information. What is next, he says (and I agree), is the Dream society, the society where people will be ready to pay more for an emotion than for a determined technology asset. Jensen describes many examples, but one of the most clear to me is the one that speaks of watches: currently all watches are ready to perform perfectly their function in an accurate mode, but one can find a wide variety of prices to perform the same function (tell you what time it is).

He applies this theory to marketing areas, and here we get to the point: industrial revolution or information society have had an enormous impact in the world, and I think the impact Jensen describes is not the impact of a world-wide dimension (as the other historical changes were).

I think the impact of the Dream Society (maybe we should call it the emotion society) will be world-wide, and people will be willing to pay less for technology and more for feelings and emotions than they have ever been. Technology is suppoused to go through, and, from some time ago on, people will want to hear the story behind.

Let's apply this vision on tourism. We have seen a big change on tourism demands in the last years that has had a big impact on traditional mass tourism destinations. Now that we have realised that what people want to buy are emotions, we will have to change the operations side of the business in order to provide emotions. This is (for example):

• Telling stories instead of presenting products in the marketing side
• Asking what type of emotion is the customer feeling when he or she gets our service
• Changing the satisfaction survey questions (if you look at them you will realise thay are all about functionality (is it clean?), not about feelings (how did you feel when you got in the room: dark?, sad?, nervous?, happy?,...)
• Training the company people in order to be able to tell stories themselves about who the company is

I think this would be a good beginning for a lasting and loving customer- company relationship and an excellent way to identify and understand how can touristic companies innovate to improve their competition position in the market.