Pine: Experiences from social to economic realm

It always is this twin thing, of what is happening on the supply side in business, and what is happening on the consumer side, on the market side. They very often come together. Because the supply creates its own demand, and demand will eventually create supply. So you have in fact both factors. The fact is that consumers increasingly want more experiences and partly that's because what they're doing is that they're taking things out of the social realm and putting it into the economic realm. And we all used to be responsible ourselves for the experiences we have. In the US one big thing was a family Sunday dinner. Sunday dinner was when everybody would come together, you know even an extended family, and you would have this wonderful dinner. It was a way of creating the social experience. Well now, we may still have that, but we go to a restaurant and we pay somebody else to do the cooking for us and do the serving for us and do the cleaning up afterwards for us. So you take things out of the social, that we've always done, and move them from the social realm, personal realm, into an economic realm. That's one of the things that's going on.There is a recognition that we want things the way we want them. We want to have experiences. You can look at what's going on in terms of TV itself, and movies for that matter, and how more rapidly cut they are, so you get this sense of, if something stays the same for too long I'm bored. Therefore I want something different. That leads into it as well. And then you do have a whole raft of supply side factors, including technology being one of them. But also there's a... fundamentally there is simply a search for differentiation. The primary reason that companies are shifting to experience is because their goods and services are being commoditized. They're being treated the same, they're being bought on price, price, price. They have to focus on cost and therefore to find differentiation to be able to charge a price premium. Then they have to shift up to staging experiences, not just delivering services or manufacturing goods.