As I am fleshing out the strategy for a dating 2.0 web experience, I’ve been thinking about what I call a “natural” business model.

A “natural” business model is when the customer demands to pay for the product. This happens when money becomes a differentiator, a resource to balance demand and supply. Consider an analogy: if you’re into mountain climbing, then you appreciate and want the climb to be strenuous. Because if it weren’t, then the mountain top would be filled with couch potatoes admiring the vistas, and you wouldn’t be able to experience the top of the world in all of its lonely beauty. Here, the pain of the climb serves as a resource to balance demand and supply. (Of course, there is also the transformational value of the pain).

Back in business, high priced luxuries have a “natural” business model. Those who wear Armani suits wouldn’t want to pay less for them, because that would devalue the exclusivity of their purchase. Speaking spiral dynamics, we’re in the orange land. But, there is more to it.

We’re basically speaking about exchanging resources (money in our case, but could as easily be intellect or generosity) for access. Auctions are the most efficient mechanism for such exchanges.

The point of all of this is that most businesses have to cajole their customers to pay for their products. BUT, if you can create a “natural” business model, the customers will be lining up to pay for the privilege of experiencing your product.

… is the belief in eternity. It is a business expression of the desire to live forever = of fear of death. A total lack of ecological and systemic perspective, a lack of a most fundamental recognition that our universe is cyclical, with every-”thing” having a birth, maturation and death.

The sacrifice of the body to the beauty, the covering up of old age, the denial of death in personal life translates into search for timeless values, pride in 200 year old corporations, cutthroat need to survive regardless of ecological and systemic damage (witness corporate scandals of Enron, Nortel, etc) in business life.

There is nothing noble about a 200 year old corporation that had to “re-invent” itself dozens of times, just like there is nothing noble about an 80 year old who has mutilated her body to look like a 20 year old.

In the organism, cells that grow without regard to the encompassing body are called cancer. Business that grows and is then unwilling to shrink and disappear is cancer.

I’ve been reading The Experience Economy, and while it’s a good book, I think there is a better way to map out the unfolding of business landscape:

1. Goods: buying the coffee beans.
2. Service: being served a cup of espresso to-go at Starbucks.
3. Experience: experiencing drinking of latte at a coffee lounge.
4. Participation: participating in choosing and brewing of coffee using the Clover coffee machine.
5. Creation: creating new unique coffee drinks.
6. Unity: living, breathing and becoming one with coffee.

Each successive level is a whole new dimension of immersion that completely overshadows the previous ones in value. The growth in value is balanced out by a narrowing of the market group desiring such deep connection to the product. True expression of individuality happens only at Unity.