The Vault
Inside The Vault you can scan a growing number Pine & Gilmore’s thoughts originally found in their idea forum, Latest Observations.
Authenticity: The New Consumer Sensibility
By Joe Pine & Jim Gilmore
In our speeches, workshops, and executive education sessions, we often make the point that we didn’t invent the Experience Economy; we discovered it. Our book The Experience Economy merely documented what we saw happening in the world of business in a way so others could see it as well, then react to what we’d written by staging more engaging experiences.
Four years after the book’s publication it’s very clear that we didn’t begin to guess at how far and how quickly this fundamental change in the very fabric of the modern economy would progress. Experiences now proliferate, with ever new and additional venues and events on the scene competing for attention. It’s also clear that as a result of the shift to the Experience Economy, a new consumer sensibility has arisen: the desire for Authenticity with a capital “A”.
In a world increasingly filled with staged experiences – an increasingly unreal world – consumers decide to buy or not to buy based on how real they perceive the offering to be. Businesses today must learn to understand, manage, and excel at rendering Authenticity. Finding ways to tap into this emerging standard of selection and criteria for purchase will become essential. To be blunt: business offerings must get real. This new challenge perhaps can be defined best as the management of the customer perception of authenticity. In an age when consumers want what’s real, this becomes the new business imperative and success awaits those who gain an understanding of what’s real and what’s fake – or at least what elements contribute to forming such consumer perceptions – about the output generated from their own enterprises.
Continue to look for more thoughts on Authenticity in anticipation of our forthcoming book on the subject!
Mass Customization: The New Imperative
By Joe Pine
When Stan Davis first coined the term Mass Customization in Future Perfect way back in 1987 it was a new oxymoron. When I wrote the book on it in 1993 this business model was, as the sub-title attested, the new frontier. Today, it is the new imperative for businesses. As the competitive environment grows increasingly tougher and offerings everywhere are becoming commoditized, companies must seek out the wants and needs of individual customers and then do only and exactly what each needs. That means first developing a modular architecture of product components, process capabilities, and/or organizational constituents; second, a means for efficiently interacting with individual customers; third, a design tool for helping those customers figure out what it is that they want; and finally the means to get that information immediately back into operations to do different activities for different customers.
Dell Computer Corporation is, of course, the world’s premier mass customizer, but look at what they’ve done lately. They’ve extended their business model beyond simple PCs to servers, storage units, network devices, and even services. (No wonder it’s changing its name to, simply, “Dell Inc.”) The company that’s received the most press lately, however, is Land’s End. Thanks to a turnkey implementation from Archetype Solutions of Emeryville, CA, in the first six months of mass customizing jeans, chinos, and the like on its website, Land’s End saw the percentage of web-based sales for customized apparel jump to 40% of the total. For some particular products it was 60%.
We know Mass Customization is truly on the ascendancy, though, because almost every car manufacturer in the world is working on producing customized cars to individual customer specifications in a matter of a mere three to five days. Once the paragons of Mass Production have figured this out, no other company has any excuse. Indeed, in this, the 100th anniversary of the Ford Motor Company, it’s very clear that Mass Customization will be as important in the 21st century as Mass Production was in the 20th. What are you waiting for?
Digital Experiences
By Joe Pine
I’ve been doing some work with Macromedia lately, and it now uses as its tagline “Experience matters”. It doesn’t mean any old experience, of course, but digital experiences.
Indeed, Macromedia Flash is fast becoming the standard for web-based animation experiences. I’m not talking about the all-too-usual “Skip-Intros” that are all-too-often bypassed precisely because they add no value to the website in the first place. Rather, I mean the actual, engaging experiences that demonstrate who the company really is to its constituents. General Motors, for example, placed on its main website a Flash-enabled version of its GM Experience Live that it tours from motor show to motor show around the world; now anyone can learn about its current lineup and forthcoming concept cars. At Jenn-Air’s corporate website the company enables consumers to design their own Luxury Series refrigerator on one engaging screen, rather than the excruciatingly slow process with normal HTML screens going back and forth from the PC to the server on the web. And the Broadmoor hotel in Colorado Springs similarly lets consumers design their own hotel stay on its corporate website via a one-screen Flash session, which dramatically changes the experience for a task usually fraught with “what-ifs.”
I’m also increasingly intrigued with the use of digital experiences in physical places. Think of Times Square in New York City, with its sign “spectaculars” (as originator Douglas Leigh called them back in the 1940s). Originally mere light bulbs (albeit thousands upon thousands of them), today such signs as the humongous NASDAQ screen and ABC Studio’s crawling “news zipper” are fully programmable digital spectaculars. Why, even the modular window signs in the Toys ‘R’ Us flagship store, while physically made of fabric, draw customers into the place through the dramatic structure of their almost constant motion – and are in fact designed and driven by Macromedia software.
Our 2004 thinkAbout Top Ten, with a Twist!
By Joe Pine & Jim Gilmore
As many people know by now, each year we host a very special gathering called thinkAbout where we explore the latest ideas and developments in the Experience Economy and act as provocateurs to help our intrepid participants discover creative ways to think about their business. One method we use to achieve our aim is by sharing our Top Ten Experiences of the Year and bestowing our beloved EXPY Award on the winner.
On September 29 + 30, 2004, we hosted our seventh thinkAbout at the amazing Cerritos Library in Cerritos, CA (which also happened to be winner of last year's EXPY!). In keeping with the theme of our surroundings, rather than highlight places or enterprises as our foremost experiences, our Top Ten identified the books that have most influenced our business thinking and writing.
And while our thinkAbout participants are privy to the full list already, if you missed the event you still can join in the learning here as we regulary unveil and detail the newest additions to the countdown.
So without further delay, we invite you to download the 2004 Top Ten to examine these influential books and their insights, including:
10. Future Perfect by Stanley M. Davis
9. Drawing a Circle in the Square by Dr. Sally Harrison-Pepper
8. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity by Richard A. Peterson
7. Learning Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown,
& Steven Izenour
6. Rebel Rules by Chip Conley
5. Times Square Roulette by Lynne Sagalyn
4. England, England by Julian Barnes
3. Nature’s Keepers by Stephen Budiansky
2. Re-imagine! by Tom Peters
1. FISH! by ChartHouse Learning
Experience This!
By Joe Pine & Jim Gilmore
In recasting various employment positions as theatre roles in chapter 8 of The Experience Economy, we outlined the obligations of dramaturgs. Our advice can basically be read as our counsel to consultants. Of particular note, we wrote: "dramaturgs should not try to have all the answers but apply their expertise to crafting provocatively useful questions."
Of course, we try to practice what we preach. As a final provocation and salute to those thriving in the Experience Economy, we close each of our annual thinkAbout events by unveiling a Top Ten list of experiences that we encourage folks to take in during the coming year. (The #1 experience is also awarded out Experience Stager of the Year - or EXPY - award.) It's an opportunity for participants to learn from various exemplars of compelling experience-staging - and we facilitate this learning by posing a question, corresponding to each exemplar, that we've crafted from our examination of its experience. thinkAbout participants write their top-of-mind responses to our questions on postcards that we provide. We collect these cards and then mail them back, one per month, over the next ten months. We also send a follow-up e-mail for each card, providing our final observations on each exemplar.
To read about the Top Ten exemplars from our 2003 thinkAbout and access the questions we pose, download the 2003 Top Ten that examines:
10. The Library Hotel, New York, NY
9. John Robert's Hair Studio & Spa, Cleveland, OH
8. Swarovski's Kristallwelten, Tyrol, Austria
7. The Medieval Times
6. AmericasArmy.com
5. Hard Rock Vault, Orlando, FL
4. Mid-Columbia Medical Center, The Dalles, OR
3. Zorbing
2. LandsEnd.com
1. The Cerritos Public Library, Cerritos, CA