No abstract

Marketing flounders at many companies today, as people have become relatively immune to messages broadcast at them. The way to reach customers is to create an experience they can participate in and enjoy, the new offering frontier. To be clear, this article is not about “experiential marketing” – that is, giving marketing promotions more sensory appeal by adding imagery, tactile materials, motion, scents, sounds, or other sensations. Rather, as a key part of their marketing programs companies should create experience places – absorbing, entertaining real or virtual locations – where customers can try out offerings as they immerse themselves in the experience. Companies should not stop at creating just one experience place; marketers should investigate the location hierarchy model to learn how to design a series of related experiences that flow one from another, creating demand up and down at every level. These various real and virtual experiences generate new forms of revenue and drive sales of whatever the company currently offers. When experience places are done well, potential customers can’t help but pay attention – and the leading companies find that customers are willing to pay for the experiences.

No abstract

By infusing your hospitality operation with a theme-explicitly stated or creatively subtleyou can improve your guests' experience and (not incidentally) your profits. BY JAMES H. GILMORE AND B. JOSEPH PINE IIthe easiest way to turn a routine service into a memorable event is to perform it poorly-thus creating a negative experience of the most unpleasant kind. But how does one turn a wake-up call into a positively memorable experience? Could wake-up calls be staged in such a way that guests share wakeup stories with colleagues, friends, and family members later in the day, week, month, or even year? The key to creating such memorable encounters lies not in improving the functionality of the wake-up call, but in layering an enjoyable experience atop the existing service.

The authors describe and explain the progression of economic value, showing that customizing a good turns it into a service, customizing a service turns it into an experience, and customizing an experience turns it into a transformation. Businesses that wish to prosper in the emerging experience economy should begin by mass customizing their goods and services. To determine which products to customize, many companies gather customer satisfaction or``voice of the customer'' surveys that use market research techniques to get data. However, these techniques do not go far enough to determine what and where a company should mass customize, because customer satisfaction measures market, not individual customer, satisfaction. The authors conclude by presenting their 3-S Model that shows the importance of driving up customer satisfaction and driving down customer sacrifice as a foundation for effectively instigating customer surprise.

Purpose – To succeed in the rapidly evolving experience economy executives must think differently about how they create economic value for their customers. Design/methodology/approach – Five value-creating opportunities are likely to drive further progress in the dynamic experience economy: customizing goods; enhancing services; charging for experiences; fusing digital technology with reality; and transformative experiences, a promising frontier. Findings – For leaders, five insights about the value-creating opportunities are key to achieving success via state-of-the-art experience staging, and they provide tested guidelines for managing in the experience economy, now and into the future. Practical implications – A huge first step in staging more engaging experiences is embracing the principle that work is theatre. So businesses should ask: What acts of theatre would turn our workers' functional activities into memorable events? Originality/value – Three key lessons: innovation to create high-quality experiences that customers will pay for is even more important than goods or service innovation. When you customize an experience, you automatically turn it into a transformation. Companies enabling transformations should charge not merely for time but for the change resulting from that time.

PurposeAs more companies wrap their offering with “an experience,” it is important that experience authenticity is understood to be a critical consumer sensibility. This paper aims to address this issue.Design/methodology/approachThe authors have studied experience marketing and found that consumers often choose to buy or not buy based on how genuine they perceive an offering to be. The authors warn that fakery, phoniness, or manipulation that becomes associated with your offering will harm your brand.FindingsThe paper finds that executives must learn to understand, manage, and excel at delivering authenticity. So how can leaders tell the difference between bogus and authentic business opportunities?Research limitations/implicationsA short case study of the Walt Disney Company shows that authenticity will not result when a company strives for a strategic position that is inimical to its traditions.Practical implicationsThe execution zone is the set of decisions and actions that a company can make and still be perceived as true to self. For companies that try to operate outside their execution zone there is little likelihood that the resultant offerings will be perceived as authentic. Managers can learn to use eight principles to guide them in delineating where exactly your own “execution zone” lies, and thereby stake out viable, powerful, and compelling competitive positions.Originality/valueTo discover your company's authentic opportunities, use the eight principles to peer into your future until you determine where you should go. And then treat that future not as a destination but as a guide to the path before you.

Purpose – In little more than a decade, experience thinking has influenced the development of new business models in a wide variety of enterprises. Design/methodology/approach – The authors describe best practices for five approaches Five approaches are noteworthy: Experiential marketing (EM or XM). Digital experiences using the Internet and other electronic platforms to create new technology interfaces focused on the user experience (UX). The application of experience-staging to enhance interactions with customers. Experiences as a distinct economic offering. Designing transformational business models that allows the company to charge for the demonstrated outcomes customers achieve. Findings – Companies can innovate by recognizing trends in customer needs and aspirations that provide opportunities to develop business models that offer high value experiences or even customer transformations. Originality/value – To truly pursue experiences as a distinct form of economic output, companies must design a business model that involves charging for the time customers spend engaging with the business, such as an admission or membership fee of some sort.