Experience 2010
This year marks the tenth anniversary of B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore’s essential book, The Experience Economy, in which the authors encouraged businesses to orchestrate memorable events for their customers rather than simply charging for a product or service. They argued that a memory is what the customer is actually buying and the more pleasant the memory, the stronger the brand attachment.
We marketers tend to bandy the word “experience” around quite a bit. And while I think that Pine & Gilmore’s shift from service to experience economy was right on target, it might be worth contemplating how the definition of “positive experience” has changed over the last decade.
This is a big topic but overall, an excellent customer experience is the marriage of brand performance and customer enthusiasm. The courtship for this marriage is a delicate dance—you can’t maximize brand performance without understanding customer perspective, and brands also can’t be all things to all people. So what can brands do right now to engage in the dance and create a blissful union?
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There were a few things that Pine and Gilmore couldn’t or didn’t predict. The great recession, free market doubts, and the consumer generated media tour de force made business in the 00 decade more serious and less freewheeling than in the 90s. So while $200 American Girl tea parties represented the experience economy of 2000, a customer’s definition of “good experience” has probably changed. (more…)