*
From the Preview pages of “The Experience Economy.’
“We’re now demassified, informationalized, digitized, and, yes, even mass customized – perhaps self-organizing and thriving on chaos to boot. Every business competing for the future is customer-centric, customer-driven, cuatomer-focused, customer-yadda-yadda-yadda. So what’s new?
This is what’s new: Experiences represents an existing but previously unarticulated gendre of economic output. Decoupling experiences from services in accounting for what businesses create opens up possibilities for extraordinary economic expansion – just as recognizing services as a distinct and legitimate offering led to a vibrant economic foundation in the face of a declining industrial base. And a new base is emerging. Ignore the familiar hype: Information is “not” the foundation of the “New Economy”, for information is not an economic offering. As our friend John Perry Barlow likes to say, information wants to be free. Only when companies constitute it in the form of information “services” – or informational “goods” and informing “experiences” – do they create economic value. Economic offerings, not forms of intelligence, comprise the substance of buying and selling.”
Throughout the book the authors refer to things like Las Vegas as a “designed experience.” Is Disney not the same? They use as an example of valuable distinctions, the coffee bean. Companies that harvest and sell coffee beans get little more than about $1 per pound on the open market. That same $1 pound of coffee beans is sold at the super market for about .04 cents per cup, or $4.00 per pound, figuring that at least 100 cups can be made form one pound of beans. Sell that cup of coffee at a diner an $1.50 and that same pound of beans is now valued at about$150.00, and again, in a restaurant at a Ritz Carlton Hotel at $3.00 per cup, that same pound of beans is now “valued” at $300.00! Going back to the original pound as a “good”or “commodity”, it was worth only about one buck – one cents per cup verses $3.00 per cup. It was “experience” and “experience” only that took a simple commmodity and increased it’s value 300 times (.01 to $3.00) – that’s 3000%!
Notice the authors use of the word “decoupling” services from everything else. That is exactly what I’m talking about. See, we think of ourselves as selling products that we create from assembled materials. NOT! We’re really “service providers” but we neither sell, market or utilize the benefits available to our clients as “service providers.” That has to change. If not, we will be for all time, relegated to “the trench” I mentioned under the “Business Concepts” thread.
Replies
*
From the Preview pages of "The Experience Economy.'
"We're now demassified, informationalized, digitized, and, yes, even mass customized - perhaps self-organizing and thriving on chaos to boot. Every business competing for the future is customer-centric, customer-driven, cuatomer-focused, customer-yadda-yadda-yadda. So what's new?
This is what's new: Experiences represents an existing but previously unarticulated gendre of economic output. Decoupling experiences from services in accounting for what businesses create opens up possibilities for extraordinary economic expansion - just as recognizing services as a distinct and legitimate offering led to a vibrant economic foundation in the face of a declining industrial base. And a new base is emerging. Ignore the familiar hype: Information is "not" the foundation of the "New Economy", for information is not an economic offering. As our friend John Perry Barlow likes to say, information wants to be free. Only when companies constitute it in the form of information "services" - or informational "goods" and informing "experiences" - do they create economic value. Economic offerings, not forms of intelligence, comprise the substance of buying and selling."
Throughout the book the authors refer to things like Las Vegas as a "designed experience." Is Disney not the same? They use as an example of valuable distinctions, the coffee bean. Companies that harvest and sell coffee beans get little more than about $1 per pound on the open market. That same $1 pound of coffee beans is sold at the super market for about .04 cents per cup, or $4.00 per pound, figuring that at least 100 cups can be made form one pound of beans. Sell that cup of coffee at a diner an $1.50 and that same pound of beans is now valued at about$150.00, and again, in a restaurant at a Ritz Carlton Hotel at $3.00 per cup, that same pound of beans is now "valued" at $300.00! Going back to the original pound as a "good"or "commodity", it was worth only about one buck - one cents per cup verses $3.00 per cup. It was "experience" and "experience" only that took a simple commmodity and increased it's value 300 times (.01 to $3.00) - that's 3000%!
Notice the authors use of the word "decoupling" services from everything else. That is exactly what I'm talking about. See, we think of ourselves as selling products that we create from assembled materials. NOT! We're really "service providers" but we neither sell, market or utilize the benefits available to our clients as "service providers." That has to change. If not, we will be for all time, relegated to "the trench" I mentioned under the "Business Concepts" thread.