There’s a lot pf excitement around the business opportunities in the ‘experience economy’:
In 1998, the term “experience economy” entered the business lexicon as a way to define the commoditization of experiences, differentiating them from goods and services as crucial consumer-driven offerings.
The importance of innovating for the experience economy | clickz.com
No list of seminal business books would be complete without The Experience Economy, the 1999 bestseller by American academics B Joseph Pine II and James H Gilmore. They argued that the selling of experiences was the fourth great stage in our consumer development after commodities, goods and services.
What’s interesting about that last article quoted from by Brendan Canaan, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, University of Huddersfield, is that the ‘consumer’ will be doing the commoditization:
Etsy offers a place to not just purchase crafts, but also to set up shop oneself. Craft, which demonstrates both skill and self-expression, can be a performance. Etsy can help consumers to craft and display who these people are as much as their macramé bracelets.
The experience economy will not fully recover – consumers will pay to perform in future instead
Indeed, companies are increasingly interested in engaging with ‘the maker community’:
Consumer Change | A new eco-system for making and the search for authenticity – Snook
And back when Etsy started up, “At last count, more than 70,000 – about 90 percent of whom were women – were using Etsy to peddle their jewelry, art, toys, clothes”: