This episode of The Knowledge Project podcast with Ray Flemings starts off with a hell of a story that transitions into an excellent overview of the procurement difficulty spectrum.

The easiest way to think about what we do is this five-step spectrum, where to the left, things are simple, and to the right, they’re difficult to impossible, so one, two, three, four, five. On the left, anything that you can purchase on a web browser. You want to rent a home to stay in when you go to LA. Well, there’s Airbnb for that. You want to buy a ticket to Coachella, go to Coachella dot com; you’ve got a VIP pass. Number two is hard. These are things where maybe they’re available online, but they’re still difficult for you to get your hands on. So these would be things like booking a private jet. You can book a private jet online, but it’s so confusing and so much brain damage from a booking. Most people use a broker or a travel person to do it. Number three, we call “off market.” So these are things that sellers want to sell, but they never list or make [them] available on a website—artist credentials to go see your favorite band and all sorts of other things that are never on public sale. Category four would be stuff that’s hard—walking on the red carpet at the Met Gala or being on stage with your favorite artist, et cetera, et cetera. Then the fifth category [has] the impossible requests, like the ventilator chase or all of these other sorts of wild and interesting things that we get called on to do.

It's useful to think about where your product, service, or experience falls on this spectrum.

Along with where your customers (and aspirational customers and those your customers aspire to be like) fall along this spectrum.

You may be an ecommerce store with a low-friction checkout, but your customers may be operating at level 4. How do you create a brand story and experience that lends a level 4 (or 5) sheen to your level 1 procurability?

It doesn't matter what your really are, it matters what they think you are.