โWelcome to the Experience Economyโ Pine & Gilmore Harvard Business Review 1998
Published Before TikTok. Before the creator economy. Before AI, before social media as we know it, before community-led growth was even a phrase.
Two researchers wrote what might be the most accurate prediction of the last three decades of marketing.
Their test for whether you’ve actually created an experience: would people pay just to enter? Not for the product. Not for the features. Just to be in the room.
If yes: you’ve built something real. If your entire value lives in what you’re selling, you’re already losing.
Apple Stores are an experience. Soho House is an experience. Glossier built its entire early brand as one. Successful conferences are experiences. Communities are experiences. A genuinely good personal LinkedIn presence is an experience.
In B2B, where we spent two decades insisting buying is rational, it turns out people want to feel smart, feel they belong, feel safe, and feel part of something. A demo won’t do that. A feature list won’t. A PDF definitely won’t.
Which is exactly why events, communities, content, and creators are becoming primary growth engines, not nice-to-haves.
This article explains, better than almost anything written since, why communities like G-CMO work. And it connects directly to the podcast above. Sydney Sloan’s entire event ROI framework is Pine and Gilmore in action, twenty-five years later
