Search results

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.

As more companies wrap their offering with “an experience,” it is important that experience authenticity is understood to be a critical consumer sensibility. This paper aims to address this issue.

The authors have studied experience marketing and found that consumers often choose to buy or not buy based on how genuine they perceive an offering to be. The authors warn that fakery, phoniness, or manipulation that becomes associated with your offering will harm your brand.

The paper finds that executives must learn to understand, manage, and excel at delivering authenticity. So how can leaders tell the difference between bogus and authentic business opportunities?

A short case study of the Walt Disney Company shows that authenticity will not result when a company strives for a strategic position that is inimical to its traditions.

The execution zone is the set of decisions and actions that a company can make and still be perceived as true to self. For companies that try to operate outside their execution zone there is little likelihood that the resultant offerings will be perceived as authentic. Managers can learn to use eight principles to guide them in delineating where exactly your own “execution zone” lies, and thereby stake out viable, powerful, and compelling competitive positions.

To discover your company's authentic opportunities, use the eight principles to peer into your future until you determine where you should go. And then treat that future not as a destination but as a guide to the path before you.

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 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.

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.

To succeed in the rapidly evolving experience economy executives must think differently about how they create economic value for their customers.

Five value-creating opportunities are likely to drive further progress in the dynamic experience economy: customizing goods; enhancing services; charging for experiences; fusing digital technology with reality; and transformative experiences, a promising frontier.

For leaders, five insights about the value-creating opportunities are key to achieving success via state-of-the-art experience staging, and they provide tested guidelines for managing in the experience economy, now and into the future.

A huge first step in staging more engaging experiences is embracing the principle that work is theatre. So businesses should ask: What acts of theatre would turn our workers' functional activities into memorable events?

Three key lessons: innovation to create high-quality experiences that customers will pay for is even more important than goods or service innovation. When you customize an experience, you automatically turn it into a transformation. Companies enabling transformations should charge not merely for time but for the change resulting from that time.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a broad preliminary overview and critical viewpoint on the current state of customer experience innovation and strategy in Thailand.

This paper outlines and critically analyses the key trends based on 15 prime instances of customer experience innovation from the past ten years in Thailand across three industries: retail, fuel service and insurance.

Customer experience in Thailand is still in its nascent stage. This is because firms are yet to realise their full potential as critical brand differentiators. Many Thai firms also miss collaboration opportunities with external partners when innovating customer experiences. This is despite the overwhelming contributions from local SMEs to breakthrough innovations and creativity. Consequently, many customer experience innovations in Thailand are yet to be truly memorable and unique.

This is the first paper that critically examines the trends in customer experience across the retail, fuel service and insurance. It is also the only paper that outlines strategic implications of customer experience strategies and innovations to date for Thailand. Both future research topics and managerial implications for Thai professionals are discussed in the paper.