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Marketing flounders at many companies today, as people have become relatively immune to messages broadcast at them. The way to reach customers is to create an experience they can participate in and enjoy, the new offering frontier. To be clear, this article is not about “experiential marketing” – that is, giving marketing promotions more sensory appeal by adding imagery, tactile materials, motion, scents, sounds, or other sensations. Rather, as a key part of their marketing programs companies should create experience places – absorbing, entertaining real or virtual locations – where customers can try out offerings as they immerse themselves in the experience. Companies should not stop at creating just one experience place; marketers should investigate the location hierarchy model to learn how to design a series of related experiences that flow one from another, creating demand up and down at every level. These various real and virtual experiences generate new forms of revenue and drive sales of whatever the company currently offers. When experience places are done well, potential customers can’t help but pay attention – and the leading companies find that customers are willing to pay for the experiences.

Many innovative companies are experimenting with a strategy of mass customization—the low‐cost production of high variety, even individually customized goods and services. Based on his experiences at IBM and research into mass customization conducted at MIT and at the IBM Consulting Group, the author has identified five basic methods for mass customizing products and services.

By infusing your hospitality operation with a theme-explicitly stated or creatively subtleyou can improve your guests' experience and (not incidentally) your profits. BY JAMES H. GILMORE AND B. JOSEPH PINE IIthe easiest way to turn a routine service into a memorable event is to perform it poorly-thus creating a negative experience of the most unpleasant kind. But how does one turn a wake-up call into a positively memorable experience? Could wake-up calls be staged in such a way that guests share wakeup stories with colleagues, friends, and family members later in the day, week, month, or even year? The key to creating such memorable encounters lies not in improving the functionality of the wake-up call, but in layering an enjoyable experience atop the existing service.

For better or worse, the business world of today is vastly different than it was a decade ago or even just a few years ago. The amount of uncertainty, instability, and lack of control that firms have in their business environments—the market turbulence—has increased dramatically for companies in almost every industry. So much so, in fact, that the old ways of competing simply do not work any more.