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Keynotes, Breakouts, & Workshops
A Strategic Horizons keynote speech introduces corporations, associations, and conference audiences to important concepts that engage their intellect and challenge their thinking about custom consumer and business-to-business experiences. Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore have a rich and highly developed stage presence that complements and enhances their ideas and frameworks.
- Speeches are designed to run from 30 to 90 minutes and can be delivered virtually or in person
- Each presentation is highly customized and reflects the industry and priorities of the client
- Exploratory conversations with key client executives prior to the speech, along with research into the company and its industry, help tailor content
- Pine & Gilmore offer their latest thinking on the subject area and share the insightful exemplars that best suit the audience
- Informal Q&A sessions supplementing the speech also help promote greater interaction and understanding.
All keynote speech topics can also be adapted to either full or half-day breakout sessions or workshops with facilitated individual and group exercises. With a generous array of formats and topics, a custom experience reflecting your business needs is right within your grasp.
Keynote Speeches
If you want to stage a compelling experience for your customers, you must stage a compelling experience for your employees. To create greater economic value for your customers requires creating employment value for your workers, giving them a reason to work for you rather than some other business. It’s your employees who in the end create all the economic value for your enterprise, so you must give them the wherewithal to design, create, and stage personal, memorable, and engaging customer experiences through an employee experience that is likewise personal, memorable, and of course engaging. Using the ideas, principles, and frameworks of The Experience Economy and beyond, Joe Pine shows you how to do exactly that, including learning from a number of companies that have fully embraced employee experiences as a core competitive advantage.
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 in this keynote speech Pine & Gilmore show 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 in this keynote speech, 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).
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. Pine & Gilmore take you through those principles that matter the most for your enterprise and show you how to create greater economic value for your customers. Based on their best-selling book The Experience Economy, cited by Psychology Today as “the most compelling expression of consumer culture in the 21st century.”
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? Pine & Gilmore recommend 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.
Observation is key to innovation: What we see drives what we think and what we do. Yet we live in an age of digital distraction, with our eyes increasingly directed at the myriad screens mounted on our walls, placed on our desks, held in our hands, even worn on our wrists. Seeking to restore an appreciation for the insights to be found in the everyday circumstances of our workplaces, homes, communities, and recreations, Jim Gilmore offers an observational tool called “Six Looking Glasses.” Using the tool is literally eye-opening, providing a practical new means to bring fresh insights to any individual or organizational endeavor. In this session, Gilmore will challenge the audience to examine how they spend time with their eyes, and then describe six different ways of looking, share a technique for developing observation objectives, and outline specific approaches to begin seeing the world anew.
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.
How does any enterprise prosper today? The key is offering compelling experiences that engage customers in a personal and memorable way. Offering goods and services is no longer enough to differentiate one’s business. In this talk, Jim Gilmore not only describes the shifting dynamics in how value is being generated in advanced economies, he shares a portfolio of specific methods for staging revenue-generating experiences. And he illustrates each technique with exemplars that demonstrate how to create experiential value in very practical terms. Audiences walk away with insights on experience innovation as well as a rich set of tools for staging such experiences.
Addressing the tension between the physical and the virtual, this Jim Gilmore presentation opens with a short “pre-show” (think Pixar short-animation before the main feature film) that vividly visualizes the impact that “life on the screen” is having on the consumer landscape. What follows is an eye-opening survey of today’s consumer landscape via “A Year in the Life of Doug & Cheryl”—using one fictional couple as a Design Persona to help executives and managers see the world differently, through the eyes of everyday people. Then the bulk of Gilmore’s talk outlines six core approaches for successfully designing experiences in the digital age—customization, gamification, subscription, admission, transformation, and randomization—in a most thought provoking session.
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, Mr. 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.
Leadership requires ongoing thinking about the very leadership principles and practices employed to inspire, direct, and encourage an organization’s people as they work together toward common goals. In this talk, Jim Gilmore walks through eight sources of useful thoughts to help leaders refresh and renew their own thinking about leadership. Each serves as a resource for future study as various issues are explored—ranging from assessing personal and professional friendships, orchestrating group dynamics, scanning cultural trends, improving observational skills, identifying future talent, seizing marketplace opportunities, enriching self-awareness, and fostering curiosity.
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 Mr. 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. Pine & Gilmore not only explain 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, Mr. 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, Pine & Gilmore lay 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.
Joe Pine
Jim Gilmore
For information on speaking fees and availability, contact us at:
+1 (330) 995-4680 or email us at Explore@StrategicHorizons.com