Designing experiences strategically☆

a r t i c l e i n f o Companies willing to enter into the experience economy have available procedures for experience design and evaluation but not for strategic decision-making on what experiences to incorporate into their offering. This study presents a procedure for identifying experiences and for assessing their customer value. The fieldwork consists of a logbook technique for experience identification and their subsequent strategic assessment considering people's perceptions of the influence each experience has in their quality-of-life, their interest in living each experience, and their previous knowledge of each experience. The paper focuses on experiences related to environmental design. In that setting, the procedure led to the identification of 13 different experiences. A clustering analysis identified six groups of experiences accordingly to the perception of 142 persons interviewed: experiences that have a ready market, experiences with a market to captivate, experiences with a potential market, experiences indifferent for a given market, experiences with lost clients and experiences that need a better adjustment to the market. Pine and Gilmore (1999) propose the experience economy as the necessary evolution of a services-based economy. They argue that technology and increasing competition would significantly reduce the costs of services, which together with increasing expectations of consumers, would make it very difficult to add value to services as well as to differentiate them in the market. In that new economy, customer experience appears as the new paradigm for added value and differentiation. The moment of experiences is here. The idea attracts the interest of many industries, and firms offering to customer experiences as diverse as chewing a gum, having a coffee, shopping, staying at a hotel, driving a car, visiting a city, or just taking a shower flood the market. As a consequence, experience design and development are becoming outstanding disciplines. According to Shedroff (2009), the process of creating experiences consists of two main and clearly differentiated phases: strategic design and development of experiences. The first one involves choosing what to develop in detail in the second one. With this respect, companies willing to enter into the experience economy have available different methods for developing experiences but not for strategic design. Several authors propose procedures for expe-Most of these procedures consist of a series of steps with practical recommendations and tools. As an example, Pine and Gilmore (1999) procedure consists of five steps or principles for experience design: first theme the …