Joe 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. Mr. Pine takes you through those principles that matter the most for your business and shows you how to create greater economic value for your customers.

In today’s Experience Economy, companies must innovate in experiences to attract and engage their customers. And with everyone now bringing their own digital devices everywhere and using them all the time, it is imperative to employ digital technology to create experiences that fuse the real and the virtual. Drawing from the framework core to his most recent 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 business amid, yes, infinite possibility.

It is not only consumer-based businesses that must change to meet the requirements of today’s Experience Economy. Manufacturers, distributors, logistics providers, and any business 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, Mr. 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 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.

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, managed authoritatively via command and control. Based on a forthcoming book with Kim C. Korn (his Infinite Possibility co-author), Mr. Pine demonstrates why Authoritative Management inevitably leads to mediocrity and eventual failure, and then shows how companies that embrace Regenerative Management — with its hallmark of meaningful purpose — can indeed thrive forever.

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, you must adopt the principle that the experience IS the marketing. The best way to generate demand for any offering, in other words, is to stage an experience so engaging that people cannot help but spend their time with you, give you their attention, and then their money as well. Through myriad examples and even astute formulas, Mr. Pine shows how your company (whether you sell to consumers or businesses) should shift your marketing budget from advertising to marketing experiences — experiences that do the job of marketing by generating demand for your core offerings.

Mr. Pine gives new meaning to the term customer centricity, going so far as to say that markets as we currently think of them simply do not exist. Markets never buy anything, only individual customers do. So how do you determine what your customers actually desire, and therefore the dimensions along which you should customize your offerings? By understanding customer sacrifice: the gap between what your customers really truly want and need — even if they do not know what it is, or cannot articulate it — and what they have to settle for today. By systematically closing that customer sacrifice gap by mass customizing your offerings, you can in fact cultivate a learning relationship with each individual customer that grows and deepens over time, and thereby lock them in.