A year ago, I carried my distressed child out of Battersea Park before the fireworks had barely begun.
This weekend, he was dancing, singing and marvelling at the sky until the very last firework.
Same event. Same child. A completely different outcome.
And a fascinating lesson in customer experience, behavioural science and the conditions that shape our decisions.
What went wrong the first time?
I'm Canadian, raising a British child. Bonfire Night wasn't part of my childhood, but it's one of those quintessentially British experiences I want my son to grow up enjoying. Particularly because he spent five of his early years in the US, a country neither of us calls home.
Last year's Battersea Park Fireworks experience was a disaster.
There wasn't one catastrophic incident. There was an accumulation of things.
Uncertainty around ride prices and tickets. Queues. Difficulty working out how long things would take. Finding food and somewhere comfortable to eat. The darkness, noise, crowds and constant jostling.
Eventually, my son became completely overwhelmed. I carried him through an enormous crowd while he was having a meltdown, and we left almost as soon as the fireworks began.
It would have been easy to conclude that an event like this simply wasn't suitable for him.
But I kept thinking about everything that had happened before that moment.
The behaviour is rarely the whole story.
As the parent of a child with additional needs, I've become familiar with the ABC model of behaviour: Antecedent, Behaviour, Consequence.
It encourages us to examine what happens before and after an observed behaviour rather than focusing exclusively on the behaviour itself.
And while the model often examines specific incidents, one of the things I've learned is to look at the broader accumulation of experiences and circumstances.
An antecedent might seem insignificant on its own. But what happens when several experiences build upon one another?
What happens when one person finds a queue mildly irritating, while another finds it overwhelming? Or when an unexpected change is a minor inconvenience for one customer but makes the entire experience unmanageable for someone else?
This is where I see an important connection to marketing and customer experience.
In marketing and sales, we often ask how to encourage the next action.
In customer experience, we ask how to make the journey easier.
Behavioural analysis asks us to examine the conditions surrounding what people actually do.
Jobs to Be Done asks what progress someone is trying to make in their particular circumstances.
Bring those perspectives together and a different question emerges: Are we creating the conditions for people to accomplish what matters to them?
One year later, we tried again.
I'll admit that Rudimental performing a half-hour set provided some additional motivation. I love Rudimental.
But something else had changed.
We now had access to SEND-related support that I hadn't known about the previous year.
Before attending, I contacted the organisers, explained what had gone wrong and asked about the arrangements.
They responded thoughtfully, clarified the ticketing and suggested a designated viewing area where we'd have more space and could leave easily if necessary.
That changed our expectations before we even arrived.
The uncertainty hadn't disappeared, but we knew we had options.
Sometimes the best friction is the friction you never create.
We arrived half an hour after the gates opened and moved through security almost immediately.
Then we headed to the rides.
Last year, the prospect of buying tokens, calculating how many we'd need, queuing to purchase them and then queuing again for the rides had contributed to the stress.
This year, we simply joined a ride queue and paid contactless when it was our turn.
It sounds like a small operational decision.
But consider what it changes.
With prepaid tokens, you're asking people to commit money before they've necessarily decided what they want to do. They have to estimate how many rides they'll take and worry about wasting unused tokens.
With direct payment, they can look around, assess the queue, decide whether something appeals to them and move on if it doesn't.
They're free to respond to the experience as it unfolds.
That may also change how they spend their money.
Perhaps they try an unexpected ride. Perhaps they spend more on food or games instead. Perhaps they enjoy themselves enough to stay longer.
We'd need data to establish the commercial impact. But the behavioural possibilities are worth investigating.
Removing a step doesn't just make a transaction faster. It can change the decisions people feel able to make.
Our first ride was NYC Taxi, a gloriously ridiculous contraption that sent us flying around, screaming and laughing.
The operators were almost theatrical, joking with passengers and entertaining the people waiting.
Even the queue became part of the fun.
The ride seemed expensive at first. Afterwards, I thought it was worth every penny.
That's another distinction worth remembering: not all friction is bad, and perceived value isn't determined by price alone.
Different people. Different circumstances. Different jobs to be done.
Food was another interesting part of the evening.
There were plenty of food trucks, some with intimidating-looking queues. But the vendors we visited served people remarkably quickly.
There were also quieter areas further along the paths, although someone unfamiliar with the event might not have known they existed.
More information beforehand about the food vendors and where to find them would have been helpful.
And this illustrates another point.
Not everyone approaching a food stall is trying to accomplish the same thing.
Someone might want a quick burger before the entertainment starts. Someone else might be there partly for the food experience. A parent might simply need to feed their child before hunger and fatigue become a problem.
A business that understands these different circumstances can think differently about menu design, food preparation, ordering and queue management.
Not by offering unlimited customisation, which may slow everyone down, but by understanding where consistency helps and where flexibility creates value.
Sometimes our own operating processes become so rigid that we make it unnecessarily difficult for customers to accomplish what they came to do.
Then came the magic.
When Rudimental's performance began, the screens went dark.
A little London double-decker bus appeared, before the camera pulled back to reveal an actual old-fashioned double-decker.
Lights came on. Part of the bus opened up.
And there were Rudimental, DJing from the bus.
For half an hour, thousands of people danced and sang together.
It was joyful.
Then it was time to move to our designated viewing area for the fireworks.
And something went wrong.
Our names weren't on the list.
After all that preparation, we suddenly had a problem.
I stepped aside to search through my emails. A member of staff noticed, asked a few questions about my son's needs and immediately proposed an alternative.
There was another roped-off area nearby, away from the dense crowds. He offered to walk us there.
No bureaucracy. No argument. No making us feel like a problem.
Just someone recognising what we needed and finding a solution.
It turned out to be the perfect place.
My son spent much of the fireworks with his arms wrapped around my side. At other moments, he was dancing, singing along and staring at the sky in amazement.
We watched the entire display.
What does this have to do with business growth?
Quite a lot, I think.
We measure abandoned baskets, conversions, enquiries, renewals, retention and customer satisfaction.
We observe a behaviour and often look for the immediately preceding cause.
But what if that behaviour was shaped by a series of earlier experiences, interacting with that person's circumstances, expectations and needs?
And what if those experiences had gradually increased their confidence, curiosity and willingness to engage? Or quietly eroded them?
Too much of marketing focuses on getting people to take the next step.
But what if the more valuable question is whether we've understood what they're trying to accomplish in the first place?
That's where behavioural insight, Jobs to Be Done, customer experience and commercial strategy become especially powerful together.
It isn't simply about reducing friction.
It's about understanding which friction matters, to whom, under what circumstances, and how the surrounding experience changes its impact.
It's also about recognising that the customer journey isn't merely a sequence of touchpoints to optimise. It's a set of interacting conditions that people experience differently.
Exceptional doesn't mean flawless.
The Apple Wallet integration for our tickets didn't work. Some ride prices could have been clearer. Finding a comfortable place to eat wasn't particularly easy. And our names were missing from the viewing-area list.
But none of those problems defined the evening.
The event had been thoughtfully organised. Security was efficient. Payment was straightforward. Food service moved quickly. Crowd management was impressive.
And crucially, when something unanticipated happened, someone had the judgement and willingness to solve it.
Wandsworth Council and the Battersea Park Fireworks organisers deserve enormous credit for delivering an experience that, from my perspective, was exceptionally well coordinated.
I left thinking about how much businesses could learn from it.
We can't anticipate every circumstance or eliminate every imperfection.
But we can get much better at understanding the conditions that shape behaviour, designing for different needs and enabling people to respond intelligently when things don't go to plan.
The goal isn't simply to make the customer journey smoother. It's to create the conditions for something worthwhile to happen.
Last year, we left before the fireworks had properly begun.
This year, we stayed until the final burst of light.
And my son has a Bonfire Night memory I hope he'll carry with him for years.
