MyPunchblog

Seth Godin has a great post up today about his experience with Air Canada. Apparently he got charged for checking his bags while other passengers didn’t get charged. In his post, Seth compares his Air Canada experience with a Disney theme park by noting “Disney charges a fortune for the theme park, but they do it a week before you get there, or at a booth far far away from the rides. By the time you get to the rides, you’re over it. The pain isn’t associated with the fun part.”

Seth uses this story to emphasize a key lesson for many businesses: “When there is both pain and pleasure associated with your service, work extremely hard to separate them by time and geography.”

I can think of many businesses that do this effectively, especially ones that allow you to use your credit card to automatically pay your bill every month. Take DirectTV for example: if I had to pay for every time I turned on the TV, I’m guessing that I would turn on the TV a whole lot less. The pain of paying for the service is separated from the fun of using it.

One more example: all-inclusive vacation resorts. By the time I’ve arrived in the sunshine, I’ve forgotten about the pain of paying for the trip. In fact, I can eat and drink all that I want without ever thinking about the cost. Brilliant.

So let’s map this onto the MyPunchbowl service. We have the same problem. When you are in the midst of party planning, there’s a lot of pain associated with all of the things that you have to buy: party supplies, an event venue, food and beverage, gifts etc etc. Our goal at MyPunchbowl is to help you separate all of the pain of planning from the fun of actually hosting the party. Most people who are planning a significant life event are planning many weeks ahead of time and using our end to end workflow to walk through the steps of event planning. Here’s our hope: if you use MyPunchbowl, by the time you get to the time of the event you’ll be relaxed, organized, and ready to enjoy it.

Let us know how we can help you separate the pain from the fun of planning an event using MyPunchbowl. We’d love to hear from you.

This entry was posted on July 24, 2008 at 10:36 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.