Interview

Joe Pine: Authenticity Is the New Quality

B. Joseph (Joe) Pine II has been interested in the vendor-customer relationship for a long time.

Pine and his partner, James H. Gilmore, have written numerous books and articles that lie at the heart of the CRM approach to business. Together they have written The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage (Harvard Business School Press, 1999) and Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value through Mass Customization (Harvard Business School Press, 2000).

Pine also wrote the award-winning Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition (Harvard Business School Press, 1993), and he has published numerous articles in Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal and Chief Executive, to name a few publications where his insights can be found.

Pine and Gilmore recently published Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, a book that tries to strip away the layers of phoniness that companies and products seem wrapped in today. Like The Experience Economy, which initiated nearly a decade of discussion about the customer experience and its place in CRM, Authenticity promises to initiate a long conversation about how companies can be more "real" to their customers, leveraging their genuineness or authenticity for market share and profit.

Influencing the Marketplace

Pine recently shared his thoughts on his latest research and the remarkable influence his work -- with and without his partner -- has had on the CRM world and beyond.

Denis Pombriant: You and your writing partner James Gilmore have been responsible for introducing some important ideas into the business world, like mass customization and the experience economy. How do you come up with ideas like that?

Joe Pine: Basically, we observe what is happening in the business and world scene. I read four daily newspapers, subscribe to over 40 periodicals, purchase scores of books every year -- notice I didn't say I read them all -- travel around the world, and constantly interact with clients and peers, and then develop ideas and models that make sense of it all. We joke that our company should've been named "Frameworks 'R' Us."

Although we've been described as "futurists," we really are not. We discern what's happening here and now that people don't yet see clearly, and then show executives and managers a lens through which they can see it too, along with frameworks for them to figure out what to do about it.

Pombriant: Your book, The Experience Economy, is almost 10 years old, but it still exerts enormous influence on the marketplace -- especially the CRM market. Does this surprise you?

Pine: Not really! We knew when we wrote the book that we were describing a fundamental change in the very fabric of the economy -- a change that would take decades to play out. Remember that the agrarian economy lasted for millennia, the industrial economy for a couple hundred years, and the service economy for the last half of the 20th century. So we have a ways to go for the experience economy to play out -- even though the transformation economy is hot on its heels.

We are very gratified, of course, at the response to our ideas and the book's acceptance across many industries and occupations. I hasten to add that we didn't invent the experience economy -- we discovered what companies and people were already doing in these industries and occupations, put the right name to it, and again provided ways for them to decide how to stage even more engaging experiences.

There is one more step that needs to happen, by the way: Economists as a class need to accept experiences as a distinct economic offering -- one that has always been around but only recently identified. It took them until the late 18th century to identify services in this same way, so I'm not sure I'll see it in my lifetime!

When Concepts Take Off

Pombriant: Has the market's reaction to the idea of experiences been what you had hoped for?

Pine: Yes and no. The acceptance amongst certain classes of folks -- particularly environmental and interaction designers, developers and marketers -- has been terrific, as well as in certain industries, such as hotels, technology, financial, and, surprisingly, healthcare. I've had hardly any clients in the retail industry -- but a lot of manufacturers that are getting into retail to create place-making experiences in order to generate demand for their goods.

One thing is really bothersome, and that is that so many folks who claim to have read The Experience Economy missed -- or act and talk as if they missed -- the main thesis: that, as I noted earlier, experiences are a distinct economic offering, as distinct from services as services are from goods. So many glom onto the language of "customer experience" or "experiential marketing" rather than truly design

Next page>>

 

 

B. Joseph Pine, II