Joseph Pine

Goods and services are everywhere being commoditized. What consumers want today are
experiences – memorable events that engage each individual in an inherently personal way.
Businesses must therefore embrace the principles of the Experience Economy to stage ever-more
engaging experiences. Joe Pine takes you through those principles that matter the most for your
enterprise and shows you how to create greater economic value for your customers. Based on his
best-selling book The Experience Economy, cited by Psychology Today as “the most compelling
expression of consumer culture in the 21st century.”

People are social beings and will always crave experiences where they are with and around fellow
human beings. The coronacrisis doesn’t mean consumers don’t prefer experiences over goods
and services – it actually makes us desire them all the more, because we realize that we don’t
need more stuff. It is the experience we have in our lives with our family, our friends, our
community that gives life meaning — and now is the time for businesses to stage such
meaningful experiences. In this uplifting and insightful presentation, Joe Pine encourages
businesses in three critical ways: refresh your places for this new world where we must make our
customers and our employees safe – and show that we are doing so. Then redesign your
offerings to stage engaging and memorable experiences that are robust, cohesive, personal,
dramatic, and even transformative. And finally renew your capabilities, in particular to be as
remarkable digitally as you are physically.

Time, attention, and money are the three currencies of today’s Experience Economy. But time is
limited. If another company stages an experience that gets customers to spend time with it, what
results? Less time spent with your business. Similarly, attention is scarce. Today’s media-
fragmented world makes it difficult to capture customers’ attention with normal advertising or
other marketing campaigns. But when another company creates an engaging experience that
does garner attention – whether online or off – what else happens? Less attention directed
toward your business. And finally, money is consumable, meaning if a customer spends a dollar
on another economic offering from some other company, then what can’t that customer do with
that dollar? Spend it on your business. In today’s competition for time, attention, and money,
only those business that stage engaging and memorable experiences will succeed, and here Joe
Pine shows you how.

Most businesses have for far too long neglected the most precious resource on the planet: the
time of individual human beings. Executives now need to embrace customer-centricity, focus
externally, and compete for customers’ time. For if you think about it, customers’ time is
incredibly scarce – we all have only a limited time on this earth to experience all we’d like to
experience, and only 24 hours a day, seven days a week to do so. And once its gone, it can’t be
recovered. What does anyone do with a precious resource? You conserve it as much as possible,
and then you use it wisely. That is what you must now do with your customers’ time. As Joe Pine
makes clear, you must eliminate activities that waste customers time (time wasted); save their
time when they desire it (time well saved); offer experiences that they value (time well spent);
and help customers invest their time in offerings that pay dividends into the future (time well
invested).

There are no markets, only customers! Markets, as commonly conceived of in business, simply do
not exist. They are a convenient fiction for companies that do not want to treat customers as the
individuals they truly are. Simply put, all customers, whether consumers or businesses, are
unique; undeniably, unremittingly, unalterably unique. We must therefore stop marketing and
start customering. Joe Pine makes all this abundantly clear and then provides clear prescriptions
for how companies can reject old marketing practices and embrace new customering practices
that will yield renewed capabilities, new growth, and higher profitability.

In the two decades since Pine & Gilmore wrote The Experience Economy, executives and
managers in enterprises of all stripes – for-profit businesses, nonprofit charities, tourism
bureaus, ad agencies, healthcare systems, colleges and universities and on the list goes – have
embraced experiences as a distinct economic offering and the means of differentiation in an
increasingly commoditized world. But how do you change from being a goods manufacturer or
service provider into becoming a premier experience stager? Joe Pine recommends that
companies give this huge task to Chief Experience Officers (CXOs), but regardless of the
organizational means, you must lead it in five distinct ways: as Catalyst, Designer, Orchestrator,
Champion, and – perhaps most importantly – as Guide. Without performing these roles, you risk
falling short of the transformation required and end up being commoditized.

Because of the shift into today's Experience Economy, you now compete against the world for the
time, attention, and money of individual customers. Therefore, whether you sell to consumers or
other businesses, as Joe Pine demonstrates you must understand that the experience is
everything in your enterprise: the experience by which you design your offerings and how you
package or represent them; the experience by which you entice new customers and keep current
ones; the experience that your offerings enable within those customers; and the experience you
create for your own employees that gives them the wherewithal to stage engaging, robust, and
dramatic experiences for your customers.

In today's Experience Economy, companies must innovate in experiences to entice and engage
their customers. And with the unrelenting rise of digital technology it is imperative to create
experiences that fuse the real and the virtual. Drawing from the framework core to his
book Infinite Possibility, Joe Pine shows you how to think richly about digitally infused
experiences and then how to determine exactly the right opportunities for your enterprise amid,
yes, infinite possibility.

As digital technology continues its relentless advance into every part of our lives, we’ve seen the
emergence of smart devices, smart clothing, smart homes, smart cars, and countless other
offerings that earn the appellation of “smart”. But simplifying tasks, responding to requests, and
using data from only one device to benefit your customers will soon no longer cut it. You must
therefore go beyond smart to find your role in one or more genius platforms. Such platforms
create an ecosystem across companies, devices, and capabilities that work together on behalf of
individual customers, supporting them in home, at work, and across their lives. As Joe Pine
explains, the race for intelligence in offerings is on, and being merely smart just won’t cut it. Are
you ready to become a budding genius?

As life has become a paid-for experience, people increasingly question what is real and what is
not. More and more, they do not want the fake from some phony; they want the real from the
genuine. Authenticity is therefore becoming the new consumer sensibility – the primary buying
criterion by which people choose who to buy from and what to buy. Joe Pine not only explains
why this is so but what companies must do to render their offerings and places – and by
extension their very businesses – authentic to current and potential customers.

If you do not plan on thriving forever, you plan on failing eventually. We can lay the blame of the
failure of almost any company at the feet of its management which, still stuck in the past,
manages for optimization via some form of command and control, no matter how well disguised.
Joe Pine demonstrates why traditional management inevitably leads to mediocrity and eventual
failure, and then shows how companies that embrace Regenerative Management – with its intent
to vitalize and hallmarks of meaningful purpose and knowledge orchestration – can indeed thrive
forever.

The days of Mass Production are over. Customers – whether consumers or businesses – will no
longer put up with sacrificing their individual wants and needs to in order buy what you have
already produced. Therefore, you must shift to the system of Mass Customization in order to give
them exactly what they want at a price they are willing to pay. Grounded in his award-winning
1993 book of the same name but built on all he has learned over the past 25 years, Joe Pine
provides insightful frameworks and practical ways companies can meet today's co-equal
imperative for both low costs and individual customization.

It is not only consumer-based enterprises that must change to meet the requirements of today's
Experience Economy. Manufacturers, distributors, logistics providers, and any company selling to
other businesses must also avoid the commoditization trap by seeking ways of creating greater
economic value. Weaving together the implications for B2B companies from all of his books, Joe
Pine lays out the core imperatives that B2B companies must follow in order to better meet the
needs of their business customers, always closing by showing how companies can create no
greater economic value than by helping their business customers achieve their aspirations. For
whatever industry you are in, your customers do not want your offerings; they are but a means
to an end. Sell the end, rather than the means, and reap the rewards.