The Experience Economy, Updated Edition

within an engaging retail factory experience. Similarly, Pleasant Rowland had just opened her first American Girl place in Chicago in late 1998. From the outset she conceived her American Girl dolls, each themed to a specific period of American history, as only a prop for broader book-reading and character-building experiences, with yet additional American Girl places in place today, American Girl thrives inside Mattel, which otherwise struggles to revive Barbie and other toys, seen as mere goods by most American Girls and boys today. And what store is now the envy of every mall owner and developer? Apple. Why? Customers clearly flock there, for not only the goods, but also the store experience, with sales per square foot an order of magnitude greater than those of the typical retailer. Interestingly enough, Apple studied the hospitality experiences at both Ritz-Carlton and various boutique hotels for design inspiration in creating its revolutionary new retail format. They had previously attempted selling direct via retail stores, as had Dell with kiosks, but both lacked a rich appreciation for experience design, opting instead to retain typical merchandising footprints. Thus experiencing the wares at an Apple store feels uncannily like bellying up to the bar at a hotel lounge. Apple's in-store Genius Bars, iPod Studios, and Classroom Amphitheaters bear a remarkable resemblance to the registration areas, concierge desks, and meeting space experiences of better boutique hotels. Moreover, these design hotels played a role in changing the competitive landscape in their own industry. Thanks to Bill Kempton, Ian Schrager, Chip Conley, and other boutique hoteliers, no hotel chain can to-day afford to merely provide basic service activities and ignore its guests' experiences. From furnishing sociable lobby spaces, to providing beds that promise better sleep experiences. Credit Schrager for kick-starting innovation in the former, and credit Weston's Heavenly Bed for the latter. The hospitality industry now clearly creates new value on the basis of experiences. Consider next the Geek Squad. At the time of the Experience Economy's release in 1999, founder Robert Stevens employed fewer than a dozen special agents in his twenty-four-hour computer support task force. Today, thanks to the Geek Squad's acquisition and rollout by Best Buy, more than twenty-four thousand Geek Squad geeks—special agents, double agents, and inside Best Buy stores—counterintelligence agents—stage compelling installation and repair experiences worldwide. Perhaps no other company matches the Geek Squad in exemplifying the experience staging principles we outline in this book, especially the proposition that work is theatre. The thematic costuming, integral to the Geek Squad being the Geek Squad, and readily and naively dismissed by other service providers, demonstrates the tangible value—to customers, to employees, and to shareholders—that you can create by boldly treating services as the stage, and goods as the props, for staging engaging experiences. Think of the number of fragmented service industries—car washes, home decorators, landscapers, laundromats, and educational tutors, to name a few—that would benefit from an enterprise emulating the Geek Squad's experience mindset. The economic doldrums in which much of the advanced world found itself after the 2008 financial crisis, resulted from a failure to experientially innovate, like each of these companies. The industrial economy has had its day. The invention and production of new goods once fueled the world's advanced economies. It is today very difficult to invent, and therefore rare to encounter, a truly new good. Most differentiation of goods now