In the extant managerial literature, the recent contribution by J. Pine II and J.H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy Goes Beyond Service , has attracted our attention because it offers so much food for thought regarding the possible evolutionary pathways that advanced societies’ consumption models could follow and the consequent strategic challenges that businesses will have to face in order to meet their clients’ new needs and to successfully adapt to market changes. Based on their observations of American society, certainly that with the greatest propensity toward consumption, and starting from the implicit hypothesis that demand is constantly on the lookout for new objects and forms of consumption, for new emotions and sensations, and with greater consumer expectations (Ritzer, 2000), the two scholars suggest the provocative thesis that, by now, the era of services is on its way out to make way for the experience economy. In this new scenario, in which there is little or nothing left to purchase, for the extre mely demanding and aware consumer, value is created by the enterprise that offers experiences, rather than goods and services. In the American authors’ view, experiences represent economic proposals that differ greatly from services, at least to the same extent that services differs from goods; nevertheless, they still represent ‘products’ which, like goods and services, can be offered to the client either singly or in combination with other outputs (good, services) in the form of ‘packages’. Moreover, compared to services, experiences stand out for their uniqueness and capacity to be personal , instead of personalized, in addition to the fact that they are ‘staged’ and not simply handed out. This implies that enterprises must undergo a transformation from being mere providers of services or sellers of goods to becoming ‘stage directors’ of experiences for the client who, in the new perspective, is called ‘guest’. By the same token, writes Rifkin, the economy is being transformed, from “gigantic factory” to “endless theater” and now “every business is show business” (Rifkin, 2000, p. 219). (… to be continued)