Saving Main Street with the Experience Economy
If you’ve been reading anything on social media, watching the news, or even chatting about the next exciting thing, you probably have heard the term Immersive Experience. With the easing of pandemic restrictions and the increase in vaccination rates, people are heading out to experience anything and everything they can as a response to being trapped inside the four walls of a pandemic prison.
Immersive Experiences are all the rage, from full digital environments showcasing the great art masters of old to psychedelic digital acid trips, these types of experiences are pure sensory engagements for the masses. Each day it seems like another immersive experience rises onto the media stream all across the globe. The wave of immersion doesn’t seem to be subsiding anytime soon. It has become a growing trend.
Despite all the hype, Immersive Experiences are only a tip of the Experience Economy. The issue is that they currently are getting all the press. Why? Because they’re novelties, oddities, and dynamic events that are created as escapes during this pandemic. This highlighting of immersive experience has an economic downside, especially for smaller businesses. That downside is scalability and cost. The worst is that these experiences may define what an experience is to the uneducated or the misinformed.
Many smaller businesses see these attractions as being the idea of what the Experience Economy is about. In that view, there is no way that a small business could even conceive of staging such an event, no less afford the cost of producing and maintaining something like this as part of their offering. It too cost prohibited, especially given the economic crunch many have suffered.
This is where professionals of the Experience Economy need to step up and into the light for Main Street businesses. Face facts, Immersive Experiences are not a sustainable solution for any mom-and-pop operation or any business looking at the long game. These types of immersive experiences do nothing to enhance or progress the typical store-front business. Immersive experiences will not improve the economic downturn of Main Street. A downturn that many have had to deal with since the Great Recession.
What most small businesses don’t know is that there is a broader picture of the Experience Economy that needs to be told and explained. There’s been a lot of confusion created from miscommunication and unprofessional designers mudding the waters. Businesses need to be shown that the Experience Economy is more about elevating any business’, small and large, offering in an engaging way to better connect with their customers than any experiential event or attraction. The Experience Economy is about staging their business in such a way that people want to come and spend their time with that business. And that time spent comes at a premium price.
For Main Street businesses to be successful and grow out of the hardships that the pandemic has created, each owner needs to learn how staging experiences around their offering can give them the edge over their competition and increase their profitability. The Experience Economy is not only about the digital extravaganzas making the headlines, it's about enhancing every service business up the economic progression in order to survive and flourish.
For further reading about how small businesses can leverage the Experience Economy and shift from a service delivery model to an experience staging model, here’s a reading list that can help shine some clarity on any misinterpretations.
Further reading:
At the Heart of Experience Design
How To Create Experiences Using Place, Action And Emotion, The World Experience Organization, Experience Campfire #10
Welcome to the Experience Economy by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, the godfathers of the Experience Economy
