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An interview with Joseph Pine II, co‐founder of Strategic Horizons LLP of Aurora, Ohio, USA, is co‐author of Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want and The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage.

This briefing is prepared by an independent interviewer.

Joseph Pine II specializes in helping executives see the world differently, which he began with his first book, Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition. He encourages companies to focus on the five ways that they can most directly influence consumer perceptions, and the drive towards authenticity.

Provides strategic insights into why the most original minds in business win.

Respecting customers’ time and innovating ways to add value to how they spend it is now a crucial measure of how well companies’ offering experiences fulfill their purpose. Time is limited and attention is scarce, so enterprising companies will increasingly embrace experiences for demand generation.

To cope with the risks of Covid infection, many consumers shifted their experience menu from physical to digital, from social and communal to familial and individual. 10;But there are some differences that speak to the future of the Experience Economy. 10;

Instead of focusing on accumulating ever more material objects, the isolation forced by the pandemic has helped consumers to recognize that what gives their lives meaning is their shared experiences with family, loved ones, colleagues and friends.

All businesses should be thinking creatively about innovating customer transformation opportunities -- for example, a new way for B2B companies to better accomplish their jobs-to-be-done.

Experiential strategies and innovations that offer customers unique value have emerged in nearly every industry and business. A noted Experience Economy strategist looks at the future of such innovations. 10; 10

The article introduces practitioners to the concept and process of co-creating customization with buyers.

This article offers a process and a model that mass market companies can use to take a scalable approach to involving customers in offering development, delivery and use.

Companies that co-create customization in a truly collaborative process enjoy significantly more sustainable competitive advantages.

For the company, co-creating leads to better offerings – including new capabilities that can be used with different customers in differing combinations – and also a more complete and clear picture of what its customers want.

The article introduces the co-creation customization model and nine strategies practitioners can use to provide individualized customer value.

As information technology and digital networking advances, success increasingly means designing offerings that respond to customers as the unique individuals they are – whether consumers or corporations – with specific needs and preferences. “Customering seeks to create a customized offering that meets the individual wants, needs and desires of each particular customer, both at a specific moment in time and on into a future relationship”.

Customering starts with the customer – not the product – and pulls together intelligence about the wants, needs and desires of this individual customer before you determine what to sell.

To practice customering successfully companies pull intelligence from individual customers – so that the information will benefit that particular customer – and then pull the offerings through its own operations to meet an individual customer’s needs.

To practice customering, companies also must surround their offerings with experiences that draw potential customers in, engage them in the process of discovery and help them see the possibilities in the relationship.

Article introduces the reader to the concept of customering, a radical strategic model proposed by the author who introduced S&L readers to “mass customization” and “experience marketing.” Customering must be customer-centric: that means placing the one who pays you money at the center of everything you do.

The author’s thesis is that today we have transitioned from a Service Economy to an Experience Economy, . What customers increasingly want are experiences – memorable events that engage each individual in an inherently personal way. And if companies want to create and consistently offer engagement experience value, then they need to give their employees the wherewithal to design, create and stage such offerings through an employee experience that is equally personal, memorable and of course engaging. 10;

The author suggests that we think of the customer/employee relationship as the experience profit chain, one that interacts in multiple and complex ways to yield a connected human experience.

Better employee experience leads to the creation of a better experience for customers, which feeds back to enabling a more engaging employee experience. Separate employee experiences from customer experiences and it will become increasingly hard to create the economic value desired by customers today.

The employee experience depends on how well companies design the time employees spend that creates value for customers.

Seminal article that analyzes and offers guidance on how to formulate the relationship between customer experience and employee experience.

Marketing flounders at many companies today, as people have become relatively immune to messages broadcast at them. The way to reach customers is to create an experience they can participate in and enjoy, the new offering frontier. To be clear, this article is not about “experiential marketing” – that is, giving marketing promotions more sensory appeal by adding imagery, tactile materials, motion, scents, sounds, or other sensations. Rather, as a key part of their marketing programs companies should create experience places – absorbing, entertaining real or virtual locations – where customers can try out offerings as they immerse themselves in the experience. Companies should not stop at creating just one experience place; marketers should investigate the location hierarchy model to learn how to design a series of related experiences that flow one from another, creating demand up and down at every level. These various real and virtual experiences generate new forms of revenue and drive sales of whatever the company currently offers. When experience places are done well, potential customers can’t help but pay attention – and the leading companies find that customers are willing to pay for the experiences.

The authors describe and explain the progression of economic value, showing that customizing a good turns it into a service, customizing a service turns it into an experience, and customizing an experience turns it into a transformation. Businesses that wish to prosper in the emerging experience economy should begin by mass customizing their goods and services. To determine which products to customize, many companies gather customer satisfaction or “voice of the customer” surveys that use market research techniques to get data. However, these techniques do not go far enough to determine what and where a company should mass customize, because customer satisfaction measures market, not individual customer, satisfaction. The authors conclude by presenting their 3‐S Model that shows the importance of driving up customer satisfaction and driving down customer sacrifice as a foundation for effectively instigating customer surprise.

In his keynote presentation “An Age of Instability?” Peter Schwartz, president of the Global Business Network and world‐renowned scenario planner, began by asking the audience how many thought their children's lives would be better than their own. A scant 10 percent raised their hands—a very different picture than would have been the case in past decades. This overwhelming pessimism is grounded in one of two disparate scenarios Schwartz outlined as likely for the year 2000. The hopeful and pessimistic signals driving these two scenarios are shown in Exhibit 1.

For better or worse, the business world of today is vastly different than it was a decade ago or even just a few years ago. The amount of uncertainty, instability, and lack of control that firms have in their business environments—the market turbulence—has increased dramatically for companies in almost every industry. So much so, in fact, that the old ways of competing simply do not work any more.

Bally Engineered Structures, Inc. has figured out how to mass customize many different types of end products—such as walk‐in coolers, freezers, insulated outdoor structures, refrigerated warehouses, and environmentally controlled rooms—based on a set of standard panel modules and accessories that can be put together in a virtually limitless number of ways to meet the needs of individual customers.