Grins, Smiles and Laughs

As an observer of human behavior, I sometimes like to see if I can pick up patterns of behavior among people sharing a common experience; like flying on an airplane. So far I have been able to isolate various segments of fliers. There are the readers, the writers, the sleepers and the lookers. At any given time any one of these people can shift into another group; sometimes they are in two groups (segments) at the same time. And if I studied these groups long enough, I would probably find out what motivated them to be in their respective group to start with.

Now what if you could observe people having fun at your entertainment center, based upon "product usage", and then segment them by how they are experiencing fun? What would you find? Would you find "laughers, grinners and smilers"? Would you find h that each group interpreted and responded to fun differently? Would you find that there was a way to motivate each of these groups to come back more frequently? I think so.

Susan Dunn, Publisher of Self Growth, an on line self improvement magazine (www.selfgrowth.com)has recently come up with an interesting treatise on "having fun".

While she asks people what their definition of fun is, the answers she gets are surprisingly stated in the negative.

"not thinking or feeling"
"being alone"
"anywhere without decisions or arguments"
"something that doesn't end me up with a policeman, a lawyer, a doctor or a therapist."

See what I mean. Fun is expressed as "the absence of a bad thing". Shouldn't fun be expressed in terms of smiles or laughs? What if there was a happiness meter, a "laughometer" or a "smilometer"? We could then gauge how happy people were at our centers or how effective our programs were on delivering fun.

Or we could just go out there every day and try to make just 3 customers a day smile. What do you think that would do to our revenue growth?