A comedy magician, an invisible tech vendor, and a company bold enough to name itself the funnest on earth taught me more about CX than most Fortune 500s ever have.
Customer experience design principles reveal themselves in unexpected places. I had the honor of keynoting the Western Fairs Association conference, where one of the main themes was the fair industry experience. At the event, I spoke with entertainment vendors who spend their careers creating memorable family moments. Their creativity wasn’t what struck me most. It was how their approach reveals universal principles — ones that apply to retail, healthcare, and financial services alike.
Customer experience design isn’t about your product category. It’s about understanding the universal elements that make people feel valued, engaged, and eager to return.
The Fair Industry Experience is Designed for the Whole Audience, Not Just Segments
Frank Thurston, a professional family comedy magician with 42 years of experience, articulated something that many businesses miss entirely. “My show is designed to entertain the entire family. It’s not a kiddie show. It’s not an adult show. It’s a show that was meant for the entire family to watch together,” he explained in an exclusive interview.
This philosophy challenges the conventional wisdom of audience segmentation. While businesses obsess over creating separate experiences for different demographics, Thurston demonstrates that the most powerful experiences create common ground. Lisa Clyde from Katie Carew Entertainment echoed this approach: “Our experience is for everyone. It’s not for just the adults or just the kids. It is high energy live entertainment.”
The lesson? Stop fragmenting your customer experience. Instead of building separate pathways for different segments, consider how you might create shared experiences that bring people together. The family that experiences your brand together builds shared memories that strengthen loyalty in ways that isolated individual experiences cannot. And then they tell others about it.
Behind-the-Scenes Infrastructure Shapes Fair Industry Experience Design
Jordan from Farm to Fair revealed perhaps the most important insight of all. The experiences customers see depend entirely on the systems they never notice. His company builds private cellular networks and connectivity solutions for fairs. That infrastructure enables everything from faster gate entry to quicker vendor transactions.
“This is all behind the scenes. Somebody who’s coming to a fair might not even know that you exist or that the technology is there, and yet you have a big impact on their experience,” Jordan noted in an exclusive interview. His systems achieve two-second transaction times and 32-second problem resolution. Those are invisible metrics, but they dramatically shape whether families enjoy their day or spend it waiting in frustration.
This represents a fundamental truth. Your customers judge you on outcomes, not on your internal complexity or the sophistication of your systems. Jordan’s connectivity infrastructure allows gate staff to “walk down the rows with their scanners, so they’re not tethered to one location anymore, which allows them to get people through the gates faster.”
Every business has equivalent infrastructure. Yours might be inventory systems, communication platforms, or payment processing — and it either enables or constrains customer experience. The question isn’t whether you have these systems. It’s whether you’ve optimized them for customer outcomes rather than internal convenience.
Marketing Without Awareness Undermines Customer Experience Design
Rob Stuverud, president of LeapFrog Entertainment, offered a perspective that cuts through typical business assumptions. “You can have a great show, but if nobody knows about it, of course…” he said in an exclusive interview, trailing off because the conclusion was obvious.
Effective experiences require customers to actually experience what you’ve created. This seems elementary, yet businesses routinely invest heavily in experience improvements while underinvesting in making those improvements visible and discoverable.
Consider how this applies beyond entertainment. Maybe you have the fastest customer service response time in your industry. But if customers don’t know to expect that speed, they won’t appreciate it. Or maybe you offer exceptional return policies. If customers only discover them after a problem arises, you’ve missed the chance to build trust proactively.
Set Expectations Deliberately, Then Exceed Them
Marcus from World’s Funnest Productions embraces a bold naming strategy that immediately sets high expectations. When I challenged him on claiming to be the “world’s funnest,” he responded: “I get people asking that question every time they see it. They’re like, ‘What makes this the world’s funnest?’ I’m like, ‘Try it.’ They try it every time. They’re like, ‘Yep, it’s the funnest.'”
This approach intentionally creates skepticism that the experience itself resolves. Rather than downplaying capabilities to easily exceed expectations, Marcus leans into a bold promise that his product consistently validates.
Most businesses take the opposite approach, fearful of disappointment. But Marcus demonstrates that when you have confidence in your experience, bold positioning creates a more powerful moment of validation. The customer’s journey from skepticism to delight generates stronger emotional engagement than simply meeting modest expectations.
The Universal Principles That The Fair Industry Experience Teach Us
These fair entertainment vendors operate in a unique environment: temporary events, outdoor venues, family audiences, limited transaction windows. Yet their insights apply universally, because they’ve mastered the fundamentals.
They understand that experiences must serve whole audiences, not fragmented segments. Operational excellence, they recognize, enables experiential delight. Even the best experiences, they know, require awareness and discovery. And they’re willing to set bold expectations that their execution validates.
Whether you’re managing a healthcare system, running a retail operation, or building a technology platform, these principles remain constant. The question is whether you’re applying them as intentionally as these entertainers do. They understand that every interaction either builds or diminishes the relationship with their audience. That’s the essence of customer experience design.
