The Experience Economy
B. Joseph Pine II and Jams H. Gilmore
“The sweet spot for any experience… is a tool aiding in the creation of memories, distinct from the normally uneventful world of goods and services. It’s very design invites you to enter, and to return again and again.”
What I like
There’s a nice balance between economic and design theory in this book
Plenty of good examples and stories that help illustrate key topics like Transformations
The escalation from Commodity to Transformation is well articulated
What’s missing
It’s long, filled with some great insights that are drowned out by volume of content
Some chapters surrounding business and theatre felt a little disconnected
Key Topics
Experience, Transformation, Engagement, Experience Design, Customization
Review
This book was originally purchased when I read about it in another book that I was reading. Having been in the Experience Design field for about 4 years at the time, I was interested in this book because it would provide a little bit more clarity around my very ambiguous field. It stayed on my book queue for some time until I went to the orientation for my MBA at Case Western Reserve University. One of the guest speakers was Professor James H. Gilmore, who is a teacher at Case’s Design program, and an author of this book. After listening to him speak I became more interested in his book and added it to my queue to read next.
This book delivers on its promise of articulating what an Experience is and how it can be intentionally designed to provide value to customers beyond that of commodities, goods, and services. The big themes that kept appearing throughout the book are that Experiences provide brands with value by Engaging customers and creating memorable experiences, and that Experiences separate themselves from services through Mass Customization- meaning that an Experience is tailored specifically to a customer’s needs. Two big hypothesis that are studied in this book are that over time, jobs in the commodities and goods spaces have become automated, and slowly the same can be said for service jobs, and that future jobs will exist in the spaces of Experiences and Transformations. Secondly, that business is theatre- which is an ancient form of evoking Experiences.
Personally, I do not think that an Experience is mutually exclusive from a Commodity, Good, or Service- as I think everything in life involves a series of experiences. Life is the largest experience of all from birth to death, and it is filled with many experiences that shape who we are. If I pick up a pile of gravel from my driveway and let is slip through my fingers, that interaction with a Commodity is still an experience- as forgettable as it might be. The act of intentionally selling Experiences I agree with though, and think that it is a path towards differentiation in the market. I was also confused that the author’s state that theatre is not a metaphor for business, but is business- proceeding to list out analogies between the theatre and business industry. I think these chapters could have been consolidated or packaged as a separate book. Theatre is different to me from business because it doesn’t operate out of a theatre, for example. You can run a business like a theatre if you want, but it might annoy the heck out of your employees and customers if business behaviors were executed theatrically. The idea of engaging in improv with call centers would get really old really fast if call center employees started reciting Shakespeare when I just need help fixing my dishwasher.
All that being said, I learned a lot from this book and hope for my own sake that this theory holds up. I was able to connect Transformational Experiences with Jobs to be Done theory and love the idea of using Experiences as a vessel to help customers achieve Outcomes. In the advent of Artificial Intelligence automating tons of service tasks, I hope for a world where human beings are able to focus more on connecting with, transforming, and entertaining each other, as opposed to engaging in more pragmatic tasks and being reduced to machines. It could contribute to a more connected world which allows us to exercise our creative human talents more freely. I recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding what an experience is, and how to create engaging, meaningful experiences for your customers.
Learnings
In economics, traded things typically take the form of commodities, goods, services, and more recently-experiences.
Experiences are often created using a combination of design choices to evoke an engaged state from the end user.
To create memorable experiences we need themes supported by cues that make impressions on customers.
An economic offering, whether a service or experience, offers customer unique value when it is tailored to individual customers at a particular moment in time and designed to meet a customer’s specific needs with no more and no less.
Mass customization is a means of reducing customer sacrifice by aligning goods or services more tailored to their direct needs at scale, building a stage for engaging experiences.
There is a handy framework called 4S for staging memorable experiences: Satisfaction, Sacrifice, Surprise and Suspense.
Work and products are theater in a sense that we are intentionally staging interactions that we have with customers in order to connect with them.
Taking your business from a service to an experience requires transforming your operational model to set stages for performances that attract and engage customers.
There are a lot of archetypes from theatre that can be used to build a more artistic side to business in combination to the more hard-nosed style of business.
Building upward from a Good to a Product to a Service to an Experience ends with the final layer of a Transformation, which is really the best thing you can do for a customer with a need.
Jobs to be Done are effective because they support Transformative experiences, which are focused on helping customer’s reach their custom desired outcomes.