The Experience Economy

The term Experience Economy was first described in an article published in 1998 by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, titled "The Experience Economy". In it they described the experience economy as the next economy following the agrarian economy, the industrial economy, and the most recent service economy. This concept had been previously researched by many other authors (see History of the concept).

Pine and Gilmore argue that businesses must orchestrate memorable events for their customers, and that memory itself becomes the product — the "experience". More advanced experience businesses can begin charging for the value of the "transformation" that an experience offers, e.g., as education offerings might do if they were able to participate in the value that is created by the educated individual. This, they argue, is a natural progression in the value added by the business over and above its inputs.

Although the concept of the Experience Economy was born in the business field, it has crossed its frontiers to tourism, architecture, nursing, urban planners and other fields.

The Experience Economy is also considered to be the main underpinning for customer experience management.

This customer behavior in the society has been acknowledged by various authors. An early example is the book of Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, which Pine and Gilmore quote in their work. In 1971, Toffler criticized how “economists have great difficulty imagining alternatives to communism and capitalism”, and how they could only envision the economy in the terms of scarcity of resources. He talked about the upcoming “experiential industry”, in which people in the “future”, would be willing to allocate high percentages of their salaries to live amazing experiences. Later in 1982, Holbrook and Hirschman’s pioneering article "The Experiential Aspects of Consumption: Consumer Fantasies, Feelings, and Fun" in the Journal of Consumer Research (Vol. 9, #2), discussed emotional experiences linked to products and services.

Then in 1992, the German sociologist Gerhard Schulze argued for the idea of the “experience society” in his book "Erlebnisgesellschaft", which was translated into English as "The Experience Society" in 1995. In 1999, it was renamed "The Experience Economy" in The Dream Society by Rolf Jensen of the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, which contained many of the same ideas.

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