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Extended-form Case Study

The experience economy and Starbucks

Published on April 30, 2025   23 min

A selection of talks on Marketing & Sales

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0:00
Hi. I'm Joe Pine, co-author of The Experience Economy and co-founder of Strategic Horizons LLP. Today, we're going to talk about the experience economy and Starbucks. It's a most important topic today because the most precious resource on the planet
0:18
is the time of individual human beings. For every business today, the number one competitor for customer attention is the smartphone. While making money in and of itself should never be the purpose for any business, it is the measure of how well you fulfill your purpose. That's because goods and services are no longer enough. What people want today are experiences, memorable events that engage each individual in an inherently personal way,
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because what's happened is that we've gone from an agrarian economy based off commodities, to an industrial economy based off goods, to a service economy. Today, we're in an experience economy, an economy where experiences have become the predominant economic offering. That experiences are what people want today. What happens in the experience economy is that goods and services become commoditized. "Commoditized" means they're treated like commodities, where people don't care about the brand or the features. They're all pretty much the same, anyway. They come to care about three things and three things only, and that's price, price, price. Given goods and services are being commoditized, that means it's time to shift up this progression of economic value to staging experiences for each one of your individual customers, and so what we need to do today is we need to innovate in experiences.

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