Experience: Today’s Currency

When you go into Starbucks what are you buying? A product? A good? A service? Or are you indeed buying something far greater than coffee? The idea of experience in marketing is not at all a new one, and indeed the general public can now observe that more often than not, the notion of experience is becoming the basis upon which many companies are competing.

Experience As Currency

Pine and Gilmore in their 1999 book, The Experience Economy, make this point very well: we have now moved beyond the service economy, into an experience economy. People pay for experiences. Think about it – you pay to go to the cinema, you pay to go to a concert, you pay to go to the theatre – all experiences. You pay Starbucks three times the price of a home-brew coffee for the experience of being in a Starbucks. You pay more for a hotel room with a view. You pay more to fly business class.

Experience is today’s currency. And the remarkable thing about it is that it doesn’t have to cost a great deal to produce. A great experience can come from the warmth of a smile, or the memory of a kind word. From the feeling of being truly listened to, or the surprise of the unexpected. The question is: what experience are you giving the people around you?