Beyond the ephemeral: Scaling experiences through productization

Abstract

Experiences have gained significant relevance in recent years. As economic offerings, people now favor memorable experiences over tangible goods or intangible services, and so they generally offer companies the prospect of both enhanced profit margins and reputation. Millennials and Generation Z consumers, in particular, fuel the growth of the experience economy. Yet, the individualized, resource-intensive, and ephemeral nature of well-designed experiences makes them inherently harder to compress or to replicate at scale, thereby limiting productivity gains. This article highlights how some companies have successfully overcome this issue by standardizing experiences and making them more product-like. These simplified experiences still deliver emotional value for consumers, but require much less company resources. Drawing from the productization literature, we break down the process and provide key questions to develop experiences that can be both commoditized and customized.