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White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group's Bamboola children's edutainment center has been cited as an example of designing for the "experience economy" in the new book THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY: Work Is Theatre & Every Business A Stage

Book Summary:

In an era of extraordinarily intense business competition, businesses resort to fierce pricing wars in order to win the hearts and minds of consumers. The dispiriting result is a marketplace flooded with affordable but homogenous goods and services, with very few qualities actually distinguishing one company's offering from another. Executives of every stripe - merchants, manufacturers, service providers - struggle to convince jaded consumers that what they offer is special, desirable and distinct from - perhaps even worth more than - competitive products.

In The Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore raise the curtain on competitive strategies and reveal that businesses are missing an opportunity for providing consumers with what they truly want: an experience.

Successful companies use goods as props and services as a stage on which to create memorable events that engage their customers in an inherently personal way. We are on the threshold, say Pine and Gilmore, of the Experience Economy, an entirely new economic era in which all businesses must orchestrate memorable events for their customers. The Experience Economy offers a creative, highly original and yet eminently practical strategy for companies to script and stage the experience that will transform the value of what they produce. From America Online to Walt Disney, the authors draw from a rich and varied mix of examples that showcase companies in the midst of creating personal experiences for both consumers and businesses.

Pine and Gilmore urge managers to look beyond the traditional factors like time and cost, and consider charging for the value of the transformation that an experience offers. Make no mistake - a surge of competitive forces is driving an economic progression from commodities to goods to services to experiences, and ultimately to those experiences which transform.

Goods and services are no longer enough. Experiences and transformations will be the basis for future economic growth, and in The Experience Economy Pine and Gilmore reveal the script from which companies can begin to direct their own transformations.

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