Spelling and superheroes N


on-profit organisation 826 National won the EXPY award last year for its writing and


tutoring centres, which help under- resourced students aged six to 18 years to explore their creativity and improve their literacy. All centres feature a little store out front – the Brooklyn centre has a Superheroes store, for example – which helps reduce the stigma for kids having to walk in for extra tutoring.


spend less time with you – they want to get out of the dry cleaners, the car wash or the grocery store as fast as they can. But for experiences, time is really the currency – it’s all about how customers can spend more time with you.” A hotel, for example, can either be an


experience or just a service, depending on how it’s offered to customers – and how they perceive it. Are guests paying for the time they spend in the hotel, or merely for a bundle of activities to be performed? Do they pay a room rate for the services or a day rate for an experience? Similarly with a gym, are members getting in, working out and leaving as quickly as possible, or are they relaxing and spending time in what they feel to be their ‘club’ – their third place?


Theory into practice The partnership between Pine and Gilmore has clearly stood the test of time, and renews itself with new ideas and vigour each year. The pair first communicated when Pine published his


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book, Mass Customization, in 1992 and Gilmore wrote him a letter about it.


“My first thought was, oh shoot, someone has gone and written the book!” says Gilmore. When Pine left his job at IBM six months later, he ended up being engaged as a consultant by Gilmore, who has a background in logistics consulting. By 1996, the pair had formed a partnership and were writing The Experience Economy. But Pine and Gilmore are far from


being academic theorisers. They’ve spent the past decade and a half of their business partnership working with companies across North America, and increasingly across the world, advising them on how to apply a range of principles to stage engaging experiences. Under their consultancy brand,


Strategic Horizons LLP, they undertake speaking engagements, offer workshops, run a global certification programme, create ‘learning excursions’ for individual companies, and lecture at colleges and universities. Their flagship product is the


annual thinkAbout event, which takes place in a different city each year and which is personally designed by Pine and Gilmore to bring delegates a highly interactive, immersive and thought- provoking two-day tour round the


‘Experience Economy’ of a chosen city. Since its inaugural event in Gilmore’s


hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1998, thinkAbout has taken followers of the Experience Economy to such places as Hollywood, Las Vegas, Baltimore and Nashville. Last year the event – which also names the top 10 experiences of the year in the US, and gives the top one the ‘Experience Stager of the Year’ (EXPY) award – was in San Francisco, while at last month’s event delegates explored the streets of Washington DC in pursuit of experiences par excellence.


Distilling the essence The pair maintain that theming is still a key part of staging an experience today, but it now has to be much more subtle – even subliminal. As Gilmore says:


Read Health Club Management online at healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital 53


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