As an initial post to this Transformations Book Substack offering, let me provide here a brief summary of The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money, the 2020 re-release of the book I wrote with Jim Gilmore. It was originally published in 1999 – 25 years ago this spring! – with the subtitle Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. This post is intended for people who have not read the book, or only read the original edition or the 2011 Updated Edition, but of course everyone can use it as a refresher (especially if you did not read the Preview in the latest edition).
The book’s core framework is the Progression of Economic Value, which delineates how we have gone from an Agrarian Economy based on commodities, through an Industrial Economy based on goods, through a Service Economy, and today we are in an Experience Economy – an economy where experiences have become the predominant economic offering. Experiences are memorable events that engage each individual in an inherently personal way. Think of sporting events, concerts, plays, TV/movies, theme parks and myriad other “traditional” experiences that have long been around, as well as newer experiences that didn’t exist even 15 years ago, such as escape rooms, immersive art experiences, and what’s called “competitive socializing” – game-playing combined with food & beverage, such as with TopGolf, Swingers, or Flight Club.
Experiences are memorable events that engage each individual in an inherently personal way.
The most important thing to understand is that experiences are a distinct economic offering, as distinct from services as services are from goods – with each higher-level offering built atop the lower-level ones. I know many people who read the book but still did not quite get it. It’s crucial, so let me say again: experiences are a distinct economic offering! Such economic experiences happen when companies use goods as props and services as the stage to again engage each guest – the term experience stagers should call their customers – in that inherently personal way, creating a memory that is the hallmark of the experience.
The 5 Experience Elements
You will learn even more about this Progression of Economic Value and its three dynamics – commodification, commoditization, and customization – in the fourth post at TransformationsBook.substack.com, the start of the first chapter of the new book.
It’s about staging experiences that are robust, cohesive, personal, dramatic, and even transformative.
Here, let me summarize the five elements that Jim and I introduced in the Preview to the 2020 re-release of The Experience Economy that we used to present the rest of the book to the reader: staging experiences that are robust, cohesive, personal, dramatic, and even transformative.
Robust experiences hit the sweet spot in the middle of the four realms of experience: entertainment, educational, escapist, and esthetic. This is our “4E” model that encourages you to reach out from wherever your experience’s “center of gravity” lies to encompass more and more of the other realms until guests encounter that sweet spot.
Cohesive experiences have a theme that aligns everything together. Themes don’t have to be in-your-face as with theme restaurants, or fantasy-like as with theme parks. A theme is simply the underlying concept, dominant idea, or organizing principle of the experience, letting you decide what is in your experience and what is out. THEMEing, as we call it (see Chapter 3), involves five experience design principles of which the first is Theme the Experience.
Personal experiences customize aspects of the experience – goods, services, and experiences – to ensure that you engage each guest in that inherently personal way. And ideally, you mass customize your offerings so you can efficiently serve customers uniquely.
Dramatic experiences embrace the fact that work is theatre and you therefore need to direct workers to act, give them roles to play, and help them engage guests on your business stage. It’s also about dramatic structure – designing the time guests spend with you to rise up to a climax and come back down.
Transformative experiences are those that change us in some way. Transformations are the fifth and final economic offering where companies use experiences as the raw material to guide customers in achieving their aspirations, helping them become what they want to become. (Want to know why there are five and five only economic offerings? Read the Encore in the book!)
Transformations have in fact always been a part of the Progression of Economic Value, and part of The Experience Economy, being described in Chapters 9 and 10 of the book. (If you’d like to learn more about that discovery, read “The History of the Experience Economy” or watch/listen to this recent podcast with my friend Stan Hustad.) And increasingly, when I work with clients in giving speeches, facilitating workshops, or providing advice, I emphasize the opportunities that have arisen in the past 25 years in guiding transformations. I increasingly say companies need to go “from goods & services to experiences & transformations”, as I recognize the world is now ready for the forthcoming Transformation Economy, hot on the heels of the Experience Economy.
Transformations have always been a part of the Progression of Economic Value
That’s why I am now writing the full book on transformations, incorporating and updating some of what we discussed in those last two chapters of The Experience Economy, leaving some ideas out, and then bringing in many new ideas, principles, and frameworks of transformation guiding, and illustrating it with many, many new exemplars.
I thank you again for joining me in this writing journey. I look forward to getting your feedback as the book progresses and takes shape (I’m not even sure of the Table of Contents). Let’s start with a few questions on where you personally are at in your understanding of experiences & transformations, which you can answer via this simple Google Form on “About Me”:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScHR4Bzfk8k3ErLBKX4G0yp2vL6ftYPop_6cw9dcQS1z5ap1g/viewform
And do read next my post on The Progression of Economic Value which I intend to be the first half or so of the first chapter of the new book on transformations. It covers some of the same ground, but much more in-depth.
© 2024 B. Joseph Pine II