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In this edition of the bottom line, we're looking at the experience economy, the name given to the idea

that we increasingly buy memories of experiences rather than actual things.

Hello and welcome to the programme. Stand back from the day to day or even the year to year

ups and downs of our economy. Instead, think about what it is we all want from life. And here

is a theory. As we're more affluent than in the past decades, that we're becoming less

interested in acquiring more physical stuff to clutter up our homes, and we're more interested in acquiring

memories of engaging experiences. So, for example, less interested in buying books, more interested

in going to book festivals to hear authors talk about their books. Well, 20 years ago, two American

business writers, Joe Pine and James Gilmore, the phrase, the experience economy to capture this

phenomenon, suggesting successful companies offer more than a product, more even than a functional

service, they have to offer a piece of theatre. Now, here's a quote from their piece in the

Harvard Business Review 20 years ago. It refers to a themed restaurant chain, named at children,

kit it out as a jungle.

And Pine and Gilmore wrote,

When a restaurant host says your table is ready,

no particular cue is given.

But when a rainforest cafe host declares,

your adventure is about to begin,

it sets the stage for something special. Well, that then is the

experience economy they were writing about. And it's fair to say there's some vagueness about

precisely what it is and what's new in it, but they were definitely onto something. So 20 years on

...