Q&A

What are some common misconceptions about the experience economy?

Pine: That experiences mean entertainment. That we have to entertain our customers and make them have fun. Entertainment is only one realm of an experience. The key to an experience is engaging people. You can engage people through entertainment, but you also can engage people through education where they are actively involved in the experience. You can engage people in an escapist manner, where they are doing things as part of the experience. And you can engage people with aesthetics so that they are passively immersed in a wonderful environment. We encourage companies to have aspects of all four realms of the experience.

Who is the most influential person in the new economy?

Howard Schultz, the head of Starbucks. Starbucks created an environment that allowed all the programmers working in the new economy to stay up late at night, working. It provides a place for all those free agents to congregate during the day, and it provides a tremendous example of a company that has taken a core commodity—coffee—and really turned it into an experience.

What is the biggest change the Internet has brought to business?

The Internet is the greatest force of commoditization ever invented. Because it is commoditizing all goods and services, it is forcing companies to think more richly about their products, and in many cases, they are going beyond goods and services and staging experiences.

Curriculum Vitae

Cofounder of consultancy Strategic Horizons

Fellow at Diamond Technology Partners

Wrote for the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Chief Executive, Worldlink and CIO magazines

Taught at the University of Amsterdam, Pennsylvania State University, the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management, the IBM Advanced Business Institute and the MIT Sloan School of Management

Former program manager at IBM

Books

Markets of One: Achieving Customer-Unique Value through Mass Customization, coauthored with Jim Gilmore (Harvard Business School Press, 2000)

The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage, coauthored with Jim Gilmore (Harvard Business School Press, 1999)

Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition (Harvard Business School Press, 1993)

Contact

Pine is available for speaking and consulting. Contact Doug Parker at 105 Woodland Trace, Aurora, Ohio, 44202-8076, 330 995-4680 or dougpark@aol.com.

Mohanbir Sawhney

E-business and technology marketing

Claim to Fame

Sawhney, a professor at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, has had his research published in the California Management Review, Harvard Business Review, Management Science, Marketing Science and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Sawhney consults for several startup and Global 2000 companies, and BusinessWeek named him one of the 25 most influential people in e-business.