Search results

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to demonstrate an understanding of:

The concept of experience and growth of the experience economy.

The role of experiences in engaging consumers and sustaining business.

The importance of experiential marketing as a tool for marketers.

Practical examples of how experiences can be used to market different products and services.

In today's economy, experiences are a distinct offering that have become the core selling point for some of the world's most successful companies. From banking and transportation, to home exercise and healthcare, companies have differentiated themselves by designing distinct experiences alongside their core goods and services. And at the heart of this transformation are the data, systems, processes, and culture needed to understand more about customers and employees in order to design unique experiences for every individual. In this chapter we explore how success in the experience economy is not simply a case of gathering more data, but instead looking at a different type of data – Experience Data. With examples and case studies from some of the world's most successful companies, we look at how the discipline of experience management (XM) and the technology available to organizations today is fundamentally changing how companies operate – and win – in the experience economy.

This chapter challenges the urban bias in studies on the middle class in India and underlines the need to focus on the significant role rural middle class plays in economic diversification. Given that more than 23% of the upper middle class are located in rural India, it is surprising to note that their contribution in supporting experience economy remains under-researched. Thus, this chapter fills a key gap in existing studies on rural tourism in India by underlining how rural middle-class has triggered a huge demand for travel within the country itself for rural cultural programmes and different schemes to promote rural heritage sights.

The aim of this chapter is to understand effects of the recent crisis on the financial constraints that small and medium size enterprises have experienced in emerging economies. Using the firm level survey data provided by the World Bank, a descriptive analysis is conducted by calculating the average of the financial obstacles that the firms had experienced before and after the crisis, and the existence of statistical difference between the two periods is tested. The results indicate that the small and medium size enterprises suffer more from financial constraints relative to large firms. Financial constraints that the small and medium size firms had experienced are largely affected by the recent global financial crisis, relative to the large firms. However, effects of the financial constraints on real variables such as investment, innovation, and research and development expenditures cannot be examined due to data limitations. This chapter contributes to the limited literature of financial constraints experienced by the small and medium enterprises in emerging economies by taking the effect of the recent global financial crisis into account. The novelty of this chapter comes from the dataset: “The World Bank’s World Business Environment Surveys,” which provides a large sample of emerging countries.

The consumer behaviour literature is evolving towards the assumption that products are inherently experiential bundles, and after all, all businesses are operating within the experienced economy. Experiences are much more advantageous for the consumers because they advance happiness or enjoyment of life (instead of survival or maintenance). Experiential purchases lead to greater happiness levels compared to material purchases. Reliance on materialism and material purchases is shown to be the reason of low happiness levels in even the most affluent countries.

In this chapter, based on theoretical as well as empirical papers, I analyse experiences and the consumption of experiences in the Turkish context. The arguments are supported by up-to-date market analysis of related industries conducted by independent market research agencies. The first section looks at the rise of experientialism in retail industries, such as in the case of shopping malls. The following sections touch upon main experiential categories such as tourism, dining and sports. Finally, the social aspects of experiences are discussed in the context of third-place experiences, and some empirical findings are presented. The chapter concludes with some recommendations for practitioners, experience designers, service providers as well as researchers.

In the knowledge economy, greater togetherness is the prerequisite for innovating and having more: selflessness extends scope while selfishness increases limitations. But human beings are not automatically attracted to innovation: between the two lies culture and cultural values vary widely, with the egoistic accent or the altruistic intonation setting the scene. In the representations of open innovation we submit to the reader’s attention, selfishness and selflessness are active in the cultural space.

Popularized in the early 2000s, open innovation is a systematic process by which ideas pass among organizations and travel along different exploitation vectors. With the arrival of multiple digital transformative technologies and the rapid evolution of the discipline of innovation, there was a need for a new approach to change, incorporating technological, societal and policy dimensions. Open Innovation 2.0 (OI2) – the result of advances in digital technologies and the cognitive sciences – marks a shift from incremental gains to disruptions that effect a great step forward in economic and social development. OI2 seeks the unexpected and provides support for the rapid scale-up of successes.

‘Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come’ – this thought, attributed to Victor Hugo, tells us how a great deal is at stake with open innovation. Amidon and other scholars have argued that the twenty-first century is not about ‘having more’ but about ‘being more’. The promise of digital technologies and artificial intelligence is that they enable us to extend and amplify human intellect and experience. In the so-called experience economy, users buy ‘experiences’ rather than ‘services’. OI2 is a paradigm about ‘being more’ and seeking innovations that bring us all collectively on a trajectory towards sustainable intelligent living.

The paper presents the concept of Solidarity Economy proposed by the Austrian-Brazilian economist and professor Paul Singer who passed away in 2018 at age 86 years in his home in São Paulo. Singer arrived at the concept of Solidarity Economy by mixing utopian socialist thought originated in Europe during the Industrial Revolution with the wisdom of Latin American working people to find alternative paths to the capitalist economic system. Following the teachings of Paul Singer, we, as practitioners and academics, report the first stage of the formation of a popular cooperative in the sector of recycling that occurred between 2019 and 2021 in the Town of Goiás, Goiás, Brazil. Our analysis of this collective endeavour leads to two main lessons: first, Solidarity Economy is an even broader proposal of an alternative to the capitalist economy than Paul Singer imagined, because its roots are not restricted to the European cooperativism of the nineteenth century, and second, economics must be taught in more popular way because the most urgent economic problems affect primarily the working people.