While looking for more things to read, I found a new heap of Customer Experience and strategy related books and have slowly been working through them. A little while ago I finished this book by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore.


The Experience Economy


Published in 1999 It’s one of the earliest books I’ve ever come across that mentions Customer Experience explicitly. I’ve recently read that it was based on an article written the year before and that indeed the term is attributed to them. Almost 15 years later, I still see it as one of the most relevant books I’ve read for our times, particularly in the era of Customer Experience Management. For a business book (and an old one at that), it’s a pretty interesting read.

The basic premise of the book explains how the focus of the consumer economy has shifted. So in the early stages we had the Commodity Business which concerns itself with basic products, sugar, gold, wheat etc. Which quickly changed into the Goods Business which sells differentiated products, as in products that are built of basic building blocks from the commodity business but they’re changed into products that have a Unique Selling Point, which is of course where marketing comes in. They next describe the Service Business which doesn’t concern itself with tangible goods necessarily but with which we’re pretty familiar with considering it makes up over 60% of the British economy (so you’d think we’d be better at it). They then go on to the Experience Business which I would argue we’re only just embarking on. This is the most exciting of the evolutions. An obvious example is perhaps those of theme parks such as Disneyland where the park is designed specifically to create wonder and amazement. Pine and Gilmore state that it’s the job of the business to create ‘memories’ for customers, in other words to architect memorable events for them, resulting in the experience or the ‘memory’ itself becoming the product.

As they Guardian recently reported, even in times of an economic downturn, the spending on luxury and exclusive experiences for the rich still continues to rise exponentially. They go on to report that people, particularly the young, are now beginning to define themselves by what they have done rather than what they own. They state the trend even spreads to China, which is an economy known for it’s obsession with brands and status symbols. I can see the beginnings of this even for those without the six figure salaries. Everyone’s heard of those track days where you can drive an Aston Martin for all of two laps, but what about this:


Zombie Shopping Mall – Complete with Endorsement from Simon Pegg


It’s a kind of Zombie Experience Day where you get to pretend you’re in a Shaun of the Dead movie. Lots of actors are in there loudly moaning and pretending to be after your brains and you go around a deserted shopping centre (a real one!) with a laser gun shooting them all, while they film you and give you the footage as a souvenir. Absolutely genius idea. It reminds me a bit of that scene in Minority Report where people of the future pay to go into a pod and can live out their fantasies, with one guy having constant applause and praise from a circle of people surrounding him, “Oh you’re so great!”.

Further on from this, Pine and Gilmore describe the Transformation Business which includes things like the education industry, where your customer comes out ‘transformed’ as a result of your business. Or even perhaps things like drug rehabilitation? Where customers pay to spend their time somewhere to (hopefully) gain something from the experience. Their main argument is that businesses can now charge for the ‘value’ that they add, and the more they add for the consumer, the more they can charge of course.

This obviously has great resonance for businesses. Even if you sell products, you can still (to some extent) design the experience a customer has with your brand, in terms of customer service and the web site that you have – they all contribute to the experience. Whether you’re an MNC or SME, you have the ability to alter the associations that people have with your business. I do think it’s time for companies to start looking to the future to try to determine how technology can help them add that value through positive, seamless experience and exceeding their customers’ expectations.