Taking “Experience” Beyond the Buzzword

It’s interesting how often this happens. You start down a path exploring an idea, testing a hypothesis, or pulling on a thread, and the further you go, the more evidence shows up. What begins as a concept quickly turns into a pattern, and that pattern becomes difficult to ignore.

That’s exactly what has happened for us with the concept of customer experience.

Over the past several months, we’ve spent a significant amount of time facilitating client interviews for our customers across a wide range of industries, from manufacturing and insurance to professional services and beyond. In those conversations, buyers and decision-makers were consistently describing what mattered most to them in their own words. Despite the differences in their businesses, markets, and challenges, the message was strikingly similar.

Experience matters.

It quickly became evident that experience is the deciding factor in how people choose, stay, recommend, and trust. The deeper we got into these interviews, the more this theme reinforced itself, and the clearer it became that experience is no longer something organizations can treat as secondary to price, product, or process.

What the Savannah Bananas Reveal About Experience

As often happens when you’re paying attention, this insight started showing up in unexpected places. Recently, we spent time diving deeper into the story of the Savannah Bananas, an exhibition baseball team led by Jesse Cole, frequently described as the Walt Disney of baseball.

It’s difficult to explain what makes the Savannah Bananas different using traditional business language because they’re not simply operating a team or selling tickets. They are intentionally designing their fan experience from start to finish. The game is only part of what happens. Their real differentiator is how fans feel before they arrive, while they’re there, and long after they leave.

After spending considerable time studying Jesse Cole’s mindset and the principles behind Banana Ball, several lessons stand out that apply far beyond sports and entertainment.

Rethinking “Customers” as Fans

One of the most subtle but important shifts the Bananas have made is linguistic. The word “customer” implies a transaction, a moment in time where money changes hands and the interaction ends. The Bananas focus on fan experience, not customers, because fans are not transactional. Fans are emotional, loyal, vocal, and they’re invested.

Most organizations say they want raving fans, but few actually design their systems, processes, and decisions around that outcome. When you begin thinking in terms of fans rather than customers, the questions you ask change… and so do the standards you hold yourself to.

Eliminating Pain Points Instead of Accepting Them

The Savannah Bananas operate with a simple but demanding belief: every pain point matters. Long lines, confusing processes, slow moments, or unnecessary friction are not dismissed as unavoidable inconveniences. These are treated as problems to be solved.

In many organizations, pain points are tolerated because they have always existed or because fixing them feels inconvenient internally. The Bananas reject that thinking. Their approach is to identify friction wherever it exists and remove it, understanding that small frustrations compound quickly and shape the overall experience more than most leaders realize.

Obsessing Over the Details That Shape Perception

Experience is rarely defined by one big moment. More often, experience is shaped by dozens of small interactions that collectively signal whether an organization cares. The Savannah Bananas pay close attention to those details, especially the ones most people overlook. They understand that trust and loyalty are built in the margins.

This level of intentionality requires discipline, curiosity, and a willingness to slow down long enough to notice what others ignore. It also requires an understanding that consistency in the small things often matters more than excellence in the obvious ones.

Designing From the Fan’s Point of View

A defining characteristic of the Bananas’ approach is their commitment to designing the experience they themselves would want to have. They regularly step into the shoes of the fan and ask whether the experience makes sense, feels engaging, and respects people’s time and attention.

This perspective shift is powerful. When organizations design experiences around how they operate internally, friction is inevitable. When they design around how people actually behave, clarity and momentum tend to follow.

Listening Without Waiting for Feedback

One of the most instructive examples from Banana Ball did not come from surveys or focus groups. Jesse Cole and his team observed patterns in fan behavior, including when fans left games and when attention declined during slower moments of play. They gathered this insight by recording and reviewing the fan experience, allowing real behavior to speak louder than assumptions.

That observation led directly to a two-hour time limit for games and a faster, more engaging pace. The key lesson here is not about baseball rules but about attentiveness. Many organizations have access to similar signals through customer behavior, usage patterns, and informal interactions, yet fail to recognize them because they are waiting for explicit feedback instead of paying attention to what people are already showing them.

Questioning Everything and Protecting Nothing

Perhaps the most transferable lesson from the Savannah Bananas is their refusal to accept “this is how it’s always been done” as an answer. No assumption is off-limits, and no tradition is protected simply because it has history. This mindset creates space for innovation and prevents stagnation from disguising itself as stability.

By treating everything as open for evaluation, the Bananas have built an experience that feels fresh, human, and intentional rather than constrained by legacy thinking.

The Larger Implication for Business

The Savannah Bananas are not successful because they are flashy or unconventional for the sake of attention. They are successful because they are deeply committed to designing an experience people genuinely enjoy. That same principle surfaced repeatedly in our client interviews, regardless of industry or size.

People remember how it felt to work with you. They remember whether you respected their time, whether the process was clear, and whether the experience aligned with the promises you made. Experience is not something that gets layered on after the fact; it is inseparable from the brand itself.

Organizations willing to listen closely, question assumptions, and design intentionally will always stand apart from those that settle for adequacy. In a marketplace where products and pricing increasingly look the same, experience has become the most honest signal of who you are and what you value.

Our call-to-action for today? Go Bananas!