Generation Reinvention 33: Boomers, The Experience Economy and Authenticity

On July 19, 2011

My guest this time wants you to have transformational experiences as you go about the business of being a consumer. Accordingly, he also advises businesses and non-profits to stop being stuck on selling commodity products and services and to think more in terms of the memories they’re inventing for customers. Creating marketplace value today means crafting customer transactions that are unforgettable events.

He wrote:

“We are now in an Experience Economy, where experiences—memorable events that engage people in inherently personal ways—have become the predominant economic offering. It eclipsed the Service Economy that flowered in the latter half of the twentieth century, which in turn superseded the Industrial Economy, which itself supplanted the Agrarian Economy.”

B. Joseph Pine II is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial start-ups. He is co-founder of Strategic Horizons LLP, a thinking studio dedicated to helping businesses conceive and design new ways of adding value to their economic offerings.

Joe Pine and his partner Jim Gilmore wrote The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage (Harvard Business School Press, 1999). This best-selling book demonstrates how goods and services are no longer enough; what customers want today are experiences – memorable events that engage each customer in an inherently personal way. Realizing that in a world of increasingly paid-for experiences people no longer accept the fake from the phony, but want the real from the genuine, so Pine & Gilmore wrote Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, with Harvard Business School Press in October 2007.

Joe Pine also wrote the award-winning Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition. It details the shift companies are making from mass producing standardized offerings to mass customizing goods and services that efficiently fulfill the wants and needs of individual customers.

Thanks to our listeners for joining this show. Post your comments and questions on my Facebook page: facebook.com/BrentGreenDenver, or you can follow me and send direct messages to me on Twitter: @BoomerMarketing. My blog, beginning its sixth year, presents a continuing conversation about the Boomer future: http://boomers.typepad.com.

Tell your friends and colleagues about a worldwide Boomer revolution, discussed here weekly, called Generation Reinvention.

To Learn More About Joe Pine’s Work : http://www.strategichorizons.com/

CLICK ON THE IMAGES BELOW TO CHECK OUT JOE PINE’S BOOK AT AMAZON