Why does the Mandarin Oriental cost five times as much per night as the Holiday Inn three blocks away? Why is a BMW three times as much as a Ford? Why is dinner at Cut ten times more expensive than dinner at Sizzler?
It’s impossible to point to any one thing.
It’s the culmination of a million little decisions. At the Mandarin Oriental, it’s the multi-lingual doorman who knows how to properly address you in your native tongue. The rounded corners of the marble desk at the lobby check-in. The embossed paper your hotel bill is printed on and the weighty pen you’re handed to sign it with. The elevators with wood and inlaid stone floors, and polished, art-deco buttons. The heft and sound-proofing of your bedroom door. The size of the crown molding. The type of sheets and placement of the bed. The selection of soaps and bath products in the bathroom. . . .
When you look at just the individual items on the list, the price difference sounds laughable. Who would pay for such trivialities? But the Mandarin Oriental is full, and customers rave, and return.
It’s the culmination of these tiny, individually insignificant details that result in an extraordinary experience.
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Short, but profound article AJ. You can spend years juggling this question – what gives things value – and still not come to any fathomable conclusion.
The problem is that value cannot actually be quantified. It is the sum of many parts, but the individual parts cannot truly be measured independently. The marble desk with the rounded corners, out of context, is quite ordinary. But working with the rest of the decor in the Mandarin Oriental, it plays a small but important part in propping up the perceived ‘value’ of the Oriental.
I recall reading that the animators working on Pixar’s “UP” spent an inordinate amount of time texturing the stitches on the protagonist’s (Ed Asner) coat. 99.9% of the viewers wouldn’t even notice such a trivial effect, but little touches like that go a long way towards creating a believable (‘valuable’) experience.