Innovation Blog

Creating Experiences in the Digital Age:

From Agrarian to Industrial to Experiences … to VIRTUAL

By Shlomo Maital

B. Joseph Pine II is the prophet of “mass customization” — creating markets of one, by customizing  products for each customer, while maintaining efficiency and low costs.  He is also the visionary who brought us The Experience Economy, which shows how creating new experiences (memorable ones are known as ‘transformations’, changing who we are) are crucial to the innovation process.  Now Pine, co-founder of a consulting firm known as Strategic Horizons, has written    Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier,  a forthcoming book due out soon about using digital technology to create memorable virtual experiences.   Joe has given me a preview of his book, in the form of a lengthy white paper.

Pine notes, in this white paper:

“That is what we desperately need in business today: experience innovation. Why? Because we are now in an Experience Economy, where experiences –        memorable events that engage people in inherently personal ways – are becoming the predominant economic offering. It eclipsed the Service Economy          that flowered in the latter half of the twentieth century, which in turn superceded the Industrial Economy, which itself supplanted the Agrarian    Economy.      As goods and services increasingly become commoditized, companies must step up this progression to stage the experiences that create             customer value.”

Note that even if you are an inventor and innovator of goods, you can greatly enhance the attractiveness of your product offering by accompanying it with powerful customer experiences, some of them digital and virtual in nature.  Some companies discover that to grow and to survive, they must transform themselves from product companies into solutions companies, whose offering is an overall package that has at its core an experience:  the key experience of gaining peace of mind by having the offering solve a problem, continually and persistently.

Case study:  NICE is an Israeli company that sold small video cameras for surveillance purposes, a product that is now ubiquitous, with many many thousands now blanketing, for instance, New York City and London.  NICE transformed itself from a surveillance camera firm into a solutions firm, by adding software that will help clients analyze the data from its video cameras, and provide a clear crisp concise report.  NICE realized that what clients wanted was not surveillance cameras, but the ephemeral experience of “feeling secure”.  It has since greatly prospered.  Its business model is summed up as “more to same” — selling higher value-added services to clients, rather than selling “same to more” — more conventional products to different clients.