Words can transform, words can hurt, words can annoy me. One word that has been pissing me off a lot lately is “experience”.
In the last month alone, I’ve received 195 emails – not counting the ones I’ve deleted reading the subject line – announcing some sort of food or drink experience.
It’s not the experience of a chef who has worked for whatever years in whatever restaurant. Nor are they gastronomic experiments, bursts of creativity that always involve some risk.
Such experiences, in the marketer’s delirium, are sets of sensory stimuli that make a dinner transcend the mundane condition of food.
As the ancients would say: go hunting frog with bodoque.
The experiences for sale are always unforgettable – which doesn’t eliminate the possibility of being a bore to remember for the rest of your life. They are almost always exclusive and/or unique, despite sprouting by the hundreds everywhere.
A canning brand tries to convince us that its new vinegars have arrived to enhance the dining experience. So imagine what a good olive oil is capable of doing, brother from heaven!
A credit card banner hammers home the slogan that you can buy priceless experiences. The bill, however, insists on arriving every month.
A cafe inside an advertising agency (what a novelty!) appears with the following presumption: to be “a hub of experiences that facilitates synergy and exchange between people”. Hub. Synergy. Come, meteor!
In time: it’s full of differentiated experience in the square.
Communications professionals turn to these meaningless words when they need to sell a product or service that doesn’t have much real assets.
The restaurant owner walks into the PR agency and is asked the following question:
– What makes your business different?
– We make a great stroganoff, a nice pasta bolognese, and people really like the lemon pie. Ah, we serve feijoada on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
– So the release will look like this: “Restaurante do Tonho re-signifies stroganoff in a differentiated and immersive experience in the cuisine of affection”.
Often they invent a real but scalphobetic experience to divert attention from the food on the plate. Dinner blindfolded. Lunch on the roller coaster. Breakfast in the orangutan’s cage. All very instagrammable, bien sûr.
Experience doesn’t fill anyone’s stomach.
Nobody argues that the business of a restaurant or bar goes beyond delivering food for the customer to swallow – the plague of delivery in the pandemic has made that clear. But this selling experience is something for those who don’t know how to cook beans.
We’ll be back soon to talk about the concept gastronomy, the explosions of flavors and, of course, the 100% instagrammable houses. For your attention, thank you.
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