Joe Pine

Goods and services are everywhere being commoditized. What consumers want today are experiences – memorable events that engage each individual in an inherently personal way. Businesses must therefore embrace the principles of the Experience Economy to stage ever-more engaging experiences. Joe Pine takes you through those principles that matter the most for your enterprise and shows you how to create greater economic value for your customers. Based on his best-selling book The Experience Economy, cited by Psychology Today as “the most compelling expression of consumer culture in the 21st century.”

There are no markets, only customers! Markets, as commonly conceived of in business, simply do not exist. They are a convenient fiction for companies that do not want to treat customers as the individuals they truly are. Simply put, all customers, whether consumers or businesses, are unique; undeniably, unremittingly, unalterably unique. We must therefore stop marketing and start customering. Joe Pine makes all this abundantly clear and then provides clear prescriptions for how companies can reject old marketing practices and embrace new customering practices that will yield renewed capabilities, new growth, and higher profitability. 

In the two decades since Pine & Gilmore wrote The Experience Economy, executives and managers in enterprises of all stripes – for-profit businesses, nonprofit charities, tourism bureaus, ad agencies, healthcare systems, colleges and universities and on the list goes – have embraced experiences as a distinct economic offering and the means of differentiation in an increasingly commoditized world. But how do you change from being a goods manufacturer or service provider into becoming a premier experience stager? Joe Pine recommends that companies give this huge task to Chief Experience Officers (CXOs), but regardless of the organizational means, you must lead it in five distinct ways: as Catalyst, Designer, Orchestrator, Champion, and – perhaps most importantly – as Guide. Without performing these roles, you risk falling short of the transformation required and end up being commoditized.

Because of the shift into today's Experience Economy, you now compete against the world for the time, attention, and money of individual customers. Therefore, whether you sell to consumers or other businesses, as Joe Pine demonstrates you must understand that the experience is everything in your enterprise: the experience by which you design your offerings and how you package or represent them; the experience by which you entice new customers and keep current ones; the experience that your offerings enable within those customers; and the experience you create for your own employees that gives them the wherewithal to stage engaging, robust, and dramatic experiences for your customers. 

In today's Experience Economy, companies must innovate in experiences to entice and engage their customers. And with the unrelenting rise of digital technology it is imperative to create experiences that fuse the real and the virtual. Drawing from the framework core to his book Infinite Possibility, Joe Pine shows you how to think richly about digitally infused experiences and then how to determine exactly the right opportunities for your enterprise amid, yes, infinite possibility.

As digital technology continues its relentless advance into every part of our lives, we’ve seen the emergence of smart devices, smart clothing, smart homes, smart cars, and countless other offerings that earn the appellation of “smart”. But simplifying tasks, responding to requests, and using data from only one device to benefit your customers will soon no longer cut it. You must therefore go beyond smart to find your role in one or more genius platforms. Such platforms create an ecosystem across companies, devices, and capabilities that work together on behalf of individual customers, supporting them in home, at work, and across their lives. As Joe Pine explains, the race for intelligence in offerings is on, and being merely smart just won’t cut it. Are you ready to become a budding genius?

As life has become a paid-for experience, people increasingly question what is real and what is not. More and more, they do not want the fake from some phony; they want the real from the genuine. Authenticity is therefore becoming the new consumer sensibility – the primary buying criterion by which people choose who to buy from and what to buy. Joe Pine not only explains why this is so but what companies must do to render their offerings and places – and by extension their very businesses – authentic to current and potential customers. 

If you do not plan on thriving forever, you plan on failing eventually. We can lay the blame of the failure of almost any company at the feet of its management which, still stuck in the past, manages for optimization via some form of command and control, no matter how well disguised. Joe Pine demonstrates why traditional management inevitably leads to mediocrity and eventual failure, and then shows how companies that embrace Regenerative Management – with its intent to vitalize and hallmarks of meaningful purpose and knowledge orchestration – can indeed thrive forever.

The days of Mass Production are over. Customers – whether consumers or businesses – will no longer put up with sacrificing their individual wants and needs to in order buy what you have already produced. Therefore, you must shift to the system of Mass Customization in order to give them exactly what they want at a price they are willing to pay. Grounded in his award-winning 1993 book of the same name but built on all he has learned over the past 25 years, Joe Pine provides insightful frameworks and practical ways companies can meet today's co-equal imperative for both low costs and individual customization. 

It is not only consumer-based enterprises that must change to meet the requirements of today's Experience Economy. Manufacturers, distributors, logistics providers, and any company selling to other businesses must also avoid the commoditization trap by seeking ways of creating greater economic value. Weaving together the implications for B2B companies from all of his books, Joe Pine lays out the core imperatives that B2B companies must follow in order to better meet the needs of their business customers, always closing by showing how companies can create no greater economic value than by helping their business customers achieve their aspirations. For whatever industry you are in, your customers do not want your offerings; they are but a means to an end. Sell the end, rather than the means, and reap the rewards.