Experiences have gained significant relevance in recent years. As economic offerings, people now favor memorable experiences over tangible goods or intangible services, and so they generally offer companies the prospect of both enhanced profit margins and reputation. Millennials and Generation Z consumers, in particular, fuel the growth of the experience economy. Yet, the individualized, resource-intensive, and ephemeral nature of well-designed experiences makes them inherently harder to compress or to replicate at scale, thereby limiting productivity gains. This article highlights how some companies have successfully overcome this issue by standardizing experiences and making them more product-like. These simplified experiences still deliver emotional value for consumers, but require much less company resources. Drawing from the productization literature, we break down the process and provide key questions to develop experiences that can be both commoditized and customized.

In an increasingly competitive market for tourist destinations, visitor attractions play a key role in enticing visitors to the destination, and as such must continually develop new extraordinary experiential offerings to keep visitors coming. The Renaissance castle of Kronborg, a Danish heritage visitor attraction and the setting of Shakespeare's Hamlet, has shown the way by staging Hamlet Live, an interactive theatrical experience. Its success is due to the professional actors' co-creative performances and improvisations. In this study, based on observations, semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis of TripAdvisor reviews, we identify and describe seven interconnected elements that have made Hamlet Live successful in terms of revenue and visitor satisfaction. These elements form an experiential strategy framework that other heritage visitor attractions could use to create extraordinary experiences. We provide recommendations on which types of heritage visitor attractions could replicate the achievements of Kronborg's Hamlet Live.

Purpose Respecting customers’ time and innovating ways to add value to how they spend it is now a crucial measure of how well companies’ offering experiences fulfill their purpose. Time is limited and attention is scarce, so enterprising companies will increasingly embrace experiences for demand generation. Design/methodology/approach To cope with the risks of Covid infection, many consumers shifted their experience menu from physical to digital, from social and communal to familial and individual. 10;But there are some differences that speak to the future of the Experience Economy. 10; Findings Instead of focusing on accumulating ever more material objects, the isolation forced by the pandemic has helped consumers to recognize that what gives their lives meaning is their shared experiences with family, loved ones, colleagues and friends. Practical/implications All businesses should be thinking creatively about innovating customer transformation opportunities -- for example, a new way for B2B companies to better accomplish their jobs-to-be-done. Originality/Value Experiential strategies and innovations that offer customers unique value have emerged in nearly every industry and business. A noted Experience Economy strategist looks at the future of such innovations. 10; 10

Purpose The author’s thesis is that today we have transitioned from a Service Economy to an Experience Economy, . What customers increasingly want are experiences – memorable events that engage each individual in an inherently personal way. And if companies want to create and consistently offer engagement experience value, then they need to give their employees the wherewithal to design, create and stage such offerings through an employee experience that is equally personal, memorable and of course engaging. 10; Design/methodology/approach The author suggests that we think of the customer/employee relationship as the experience profit chain, one that interacts in multiple and complex ways to yield a connected human experience. Findings Better employee experience leads to the creation of a better experience for customers, which feeds back to enabling a more engaging employee experience. Separate employee experiences from customer experiences and it will become increasingly hard to create the economic value desired by customers today. Practical implications The employee experience depends on how well companies design the time employees spend that creates value for customers. Originality/value Seminal article that analyzes and offers guidance on how to formulate the relationship between customer experience and employee experience.

Purpose As information technology and digital networking advances, success increasingly means designing offerings that respond to customers as the unique individuals they are – whether consumers or corporations – with specific needs and preferences. “Customering seeks to create a customized offering that meets the individual wants, needs and desires of each particular customer, both at a specific moment in time and on into a future relationship”. Design/methodology/approach Customering starts with the customer – not the product – and pulls together intelligence about the wants, needs and desires of this individual customer before you determine what to sell. Findings To practice customering successfully companies pull intelligence from individual customers – so that the information will benefit that particular customer – and then pull the offerings through its own operations to meet an individual customer’s needs. Practical implications To practice customering, companies also must surround their offerings with experiences that draw potential customers in, engage them in the process of discovery and help them see the possibilities in the relationship. Originality/value Article introduces the reader to the concept of customering, a radical strategic model proposed by the author who introduced S&L readers to “mass customization” and “experience marketing.” Customering must be customer-centric: that means placing the one who pays you money at the center of everything you do.

This chapter defines mass customization as "variety and customization through flexibility and quick responsiveness." The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines marketing as "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large." Marketing, as it is commonly carried out in most enterprises, is push, push, push. It takes an offering that is generally already hanging on a rack, lying in a lot, or sitting on a shelf somewhere and seeks to push what it already made onto a customer, often without caring whether the offering really meets the needs of whoever buys it. Perhaps the most pernicious practice of marketing is targeting customers that the company thinks – based on what little it knows – might be in the market for one of its offerings, and then bombarding them with messages to buy, buy, buy that offering.

Purpose The article introduces practitioners to the concept and process of co-creating customization with buyers. Design/methodology/approach This article offers a process and a model that mass market companies can use to take a scalable approach to involving customers in offering development, delivery and use. Findings Companies that co-create customization in a truly collaborative process enjoy significantly more sustainable competitive advantages. Practical implications For the company, co-creating leads to better offerings – including new capabilities that can be used with different customers in differing combinations – and also a more complete and clear picture of what its customers want. Originality/value The article introduces the co-creation customization model and nine strategies practitioners can use to provide individualized customer value.

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.

Purpose – This article explains how B2B companies can create economic value by designing experiences and innovations that will be transformative for their customers. Design/methodology/approach – The article shows that B2B goods and services are increasingly marketed in an Experience Economy, an arena where interactions are based on what experiences buyers and their customers value. Findings – The big value creation insight is that industrial companies. like consumer product companies, can create breakthrough innovations by understanding, responding to and transforming the experience of their customers. But with B2B companies the experience discovery process extends to their customers’ customers. Practical implications – Almost any B2B business can be transformative if it aims its innovation efforts at satisfying its customers emerging needs and those of its customers’ customers. These are the aspirational outcomes that transformative companies provide. Originality/value – One of the first articles to show leadership of B2B companies and their marketing and research units how to set up experience demonstrations and development projects that involve their customers in the process of customization, innovation and transformation.

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.

This illuminating Handbook presents the state-of-the-art in the scientific field of experience economy studies. It offers a rich and varied collection of contributions that discuss different issues of crucial importance for our understanding of the experience economy. Each chapter reflects diverse scientific viewpoints from disciplines including management, mainstream economics and sociology to provide a comprehensive overview.

PurposeThe article describes how to strategically analyze and stage manage the customer journey – the sequence of events that customers go through to learn about, purchase and interact with company offerings.Design/methodology/approachThe article explains how to develop a customer journey that implements a coherent strategic plan. One that follows a scripted sequence of events companies produce to deliver value to the customer, profitability to the company and differentiation from the competition.FindingsThe customer journey, when approached as a strategic design process, can provide all the elements of a business with a unifying organizational map.Research limitations/implicationsThe examples reported on in this article are drawn from the authors' consulting experience.Practical implicationsToo often companies map a customer journey without any real participation from customers themselves. It's best to start by identifying jobs customers need to get done so that companies clarify what aspects of the journey are most important to the customer.Originality/valueTop executives should make their company's goal to align its business strategy and the experiences that create most value for customers.

PurposeThis paper aims to offer a new experience innovation framework to identify new customer value and develop potential new business models.Design/methodology/approachThe framework, a Typology of Human Capability, illuminates the potential uses for digital technology across four dimensions of human experience.FindingsWhen exploring the frontiers of discovery and innovation, the Typology of Human Capability can be a useful guide to innovation opportunities.Practical implicationsDigital technology enables new‐to‐the‐world possibilities for the delivery of emotion‐evoking experiences by an ever‐broadening array of methods that engage our human senses through endless sights, sounds, and other sensations.Originality/valueViewing value creation possibilities with the typology in this paperhelps companies tap the infinite possibility inherent in today's digital technology. Understanding this linkage between technology, human capability, and value creation can boost a firm's creative capabilities.

Purpose – This paper, written by leading brand experience consultants, aims to describe how disruptive innovation occurs for experience offerings.

Contrived. Disingenuous. Phony. Inauthentic. Do your customers use any of these words to describe what you sell--or how you sell it? If so, welcome to the club. Inundated by fakes and sophisticated counterfeits, people increasingly see the world in terms of real or fake. They would rather buy something real from someone genuine rather than something from some phony. When deciding to buy, consumers judge an offering's (and a company's) authenticity as much as--if not more than--price, quality, and availability. In Authenticity, James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II argue that to trounce rivals companies must grasp, manage, and excel at rendering authenticity. Through examples from a wide array of industries as well as government, nonprofit, education, and religious sectors, the authors show how to manage customers' perception of authenticity by: recognizing how businesses fake it; appealing to the five different genres of authenticity; charting how to be true to self and what you say you are; and crafting and implementing business strategies for rendering authenticity. The first to explore what authenticity really means for businesses and how companies can approach it both thoughtfully and thoroughly, this book is a must-read for any organization seeking to fulfill consumers' intensifying demand for the real deal.

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.