Care More: How You Create Loyal Customers and Fans

metal gear solid v phantom pain birthday easter egg

Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain Birthday Easter Egg

As you may have read before on my blog; I’m a gamer. Have been since my mom gifted me the original Nintendo. As gamers, we all have our list of all-time favorite games. For me, at the top of the list sits the Metal Gear Solid series from Hideo Kojima. While I like the series for many reasons – the sci-fi military angle, the game play, the characters and stories – the attention to detail paid by its creator is what gets me hooked the most; it’s inspiring.

Those of us who obsess over the little details – from how the rain hits Snake, how the wind blows his hair, how smoke looks, etc. – await the next installment in the series with great enthusiasm because the attention to detail goes so deep that in every new installment you can expect unexpected surprises.

For example, a friend of mine celebrated his birthday last week; he’s also a fan of Metal Gear Solid and its creator Hideo Kojima. Being a loyal gamer, he played the most recent title Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain on his birthday and got one of those unexpected surprises. During the game he got an urgent message to go to Mother Base because of an emergency, little did he know that the emergency was just a ploy to get him to Mother Base where his loyal soldiers were waiting for him to sing and wish him a happy birthday!

Watch the video below:

My friend says he was shocked and awed!

In video game parlance, this is called an easter egg; and this is a great one!

You don’t have to be a fan of video games to appreciate this small but unexpected gesture, one that personalizes the game experience further for the player; it cheers you up. It’s such a small thing, but those little touches make the whole experience that much more enjoyable, maybe even on a personal level.

It’s the details that count and make a difference

Similar to how music bands have die hard fans, the video game industry isn’t far behind in generating a unique level of fandom that non-entertainment industry companies would only dream about having.

Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid Series attention to detail is a lesson in how any type of business can create loyal customers and fans: care more.

As Angela Ahrendts says, “Empathy is the greatest creator of energy“. She should know, she’s now the Head of Retail for Apple, a company that has loyalty and fandom to spare.

This important because the Next Economy will be dominated by technology, which will make our lives easier and more efficient. But we have to become more human the more technologically advanced society becomes; we have to care more.

Why? Because it’s the human touch that will get lost if we start falling in love with automation and efficiency. Look at it this way: the companies who will drive the Next Economy will out-think and out-care those that don’t!

But if you can’t out-think, out-care!