It's the Experience, Stupid!

"Over 18 years ago, Joe Pine and James Gilmore declared 'Welcome to the Experience Economy' and described a new state in the progression of economic value creation in which the emerging competitive battleground laid in staging experiences. Since then pundits have suggested that commerce has progressed to the digital economy (based on how the Internet created a global, interactive marketplace), the network economy (in which value is created and shared by all members of a network), and most recently the sharing economy (involving the sharing and reuse of excess capacity to increase the value of goods and services). These developments have indeed re-conceived the economic landscape, remade entire industries, and created seismic shifts in the way people live, connect, and do business. But they don't detract from the prominence of experience as the frontier on which companies compete and win today. Businesses may not be charging admission to staged experiences, as Pine and Gilmore predicted, but they are designing and differentiating their offerings to appeal to the buyers of experiences—or, at least, they should be. That's because, when it comes to value creation, the more things change, the more they stay the same."