My girlfriend and I had a few friends over this weekend. It was a great evening with some close friends and a few I had only met once. It was a fantastic night with those rare moments of conversational balance and disruption. It was fun. After the evening I posted on Facebook: "Parties at your place are selfishly for your own pleasure. Choose (curate) the people that you would spend the evening and early morning with. A recipe for success."
Today I was looking at possible getting a new phone and I kept telling myself: "But I don't want that, I don't need this." It was a sequence of horrible customer experiences.
Consumers are sick of choices and done with having to think and evaluate. Consumers want to trust your brand to make the right choice for them. John chooses Apple because he trusts that they'll do the right thing for him. My friend David chooses 37Signals products because it doesn't have the complexities which his company does not need most of the time anyway.
We have left the world of not enough in which brands were chosen because they could provide so much. We're entering a world of too much. Too much data. Too many products. Too many choices. Today, consumers are loyal to brands which cull away all the noise and provide a simple and pure customer experience. Brands are curators, whittling away at an offering to reveal its core.
Look at your brand experience from your customers eyes. Look how many interactions there are. How can you simplify your customers experience? How can you take away complexity from your customer experience? How do you curate?