James Gilmore

As co-author of The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage, James H. Gilmore literally wrote the book that spawned worldwide interest in experience design, customer experience management, and experiential marketing. Tom Peters rightly called The Experience Economy “a brilliant, absolutely original book.” Now published in ten languages, the book continues to find new readers across myriad industries as businesses find their goods and services commoditized, with customers increasingly spending their time and money on experiences—memorable events that engage them in an inherently personal way.

Gilmore’s most recent book, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, contends that Authenticity is the new Quality, and that businesses must learn to manage authenticity as a distinct business discipline. Indeed, in a world of increasingly commercialized activity—intentionally staged and technologically mediated—people today want the real from the genuine, not the fake from some phony. For businesses and industries sensing the need to render greater authenticity, Gilmore and his co-author Joe Pine, offer unparalleled insights concerning this important new issue.

Jim is co-founder of Aurora, Ohio-based Strategic Horizons LLP. He is a “professional observer,” sought by enterprises around the globe for his expertise in conceiving and designing new ways of adding value to their economic offerings. He is a frequent keynote speaker, as well as workshop facilitator and executive coach; a number of professional societies, trade associations, and individual companies also engage Gilmore to help design their overall events. Most interestingly, many organizations employ him to conduct “learning excursions”—peripatetic tours of exemplary experiences in the cities in which they convene conferences and events, followed by intensive debriefs to extract lessons learned from the touring.

Gilmore’s ideas have been featured in numerous articles on business strategy and innovation for such publications as the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and Investors Business Daily, among others. He is also co-editor of Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value Through Mass Customization.

Mr. Gilmore began his career with Procter & Gamble and then spent over ten years consulting with Cleveland Consulting Associates and Computer Sciences Corporation, heading up CSC Consulting's process innovation practice before starting his own firm. Mr. Gilmore is currently a Batten Fellow and Visiting Lecturer at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. He previously served as the 2002-2003 Dean Helen LeBaron Hilton Endowed Co-chair at the College of Family & Consumer Sciences at Iowa State University. Mr. Gilmore is a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania—and an avid Cleveland Indians baseball fan.

• 4. Design What? How Goods, Services and Experiences Vary in Value-Creating Attributes

  Jim Gilmore will share his perspective on excellent design, and how successful design necessarily varies for goods, services, and experiences. He will share his perspective on the design appeal of the (experience) enterprises that have won Pine & Gilmore's Experience Stager of the Year (EXPY) award, but then present examples of the physical things (goods) and intangible activities (services) that he most admires for their design distinctions – and the principles he detects that create their appeal.

• 3. Everything You Need to Innovate Can Be Learned From Reality TV

  One of the privileges for Jim Gilmore to result from the success of The Experience Economy is the number of entrepreneurs who contact him for feedback about the launch of their experience-based ventures. In this session, Gilmore will walk through ten start-up businesses that have approached him in recent years in search of advice and/or capital. Gilmore has secured permission from each new venture to share their basic business concept. The audience will then vote on which they think is most viable. In a shockingly unexpected finale to the talk, Gilmore will share his perspective on the role Reality TV played in conceptualizing each new enterprise!

• 2. Welcome to the Experience Economy

  A fundamental shift is occurring in the very fabric of our economy. Today, what people desire are neither goods nor services, but something very different in kind, namely experiences that engage them in a personal and memorable way. Such experiences will increasingly command a premium fee and provide the basis for generating new revenue growth in for individual businesses and overall prosperity for both advanced and developing nations. In this provocative session, Gilmore will describe the nature of this emerging Experience Economy and outline principles for staging compelling experiences.

• 1. Get Real: Authenticity is the New Quality

  In a world filled with ever more mediated and staged experiences ― an increasingly unreal world ― consumers are now making decisions based on how real they perceive various offerings to be. As a result, enterprises must become adept at rendering authenticity. Finding ways to tap into this emerging sensibility will become essential for success in the years and decades to come. This new challenge can be defined best as the management of the customer perception of authenticity. To be blunt: you must get real and not just claim you're real.

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  September 2007

  Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want

  Contrived. Disingenuous. Phony. Inauthentic. Do your customers use any of these words to describe what you sellor how you sell it? If so, welcome to the club. Inundated by fakes and sophisticated counterfeits, people increasingly see the world in terms of real or fake. They would rather buy something real from someone genuine, rather than something fake from some phony. When deciding to buy, consumers judge an offerings (and a companys) authenticity as much asif not more thanprice, quality, and availability.

  
  
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  February 2000

  Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value Through Mass Customization

  As Editors Jim Gilmore and Joe Pine point out in their introduction to Markets of One, mass customization is a trend that has caught on among consumer and business-to-business companies alike - think of Levi''s jeans, Aramark''s hospital services, Select Comfort mattresses, and Peapod or Streamline grocery delivery, to name a few. Companies customize their offerings to meet the unique needs of individual customers so that nearly everyone can obtain exactly what they want at a reasonable price. It''s a paradigm shift away from the one-size-fits-all way managers have thought about markets over the past century- today, every individual customer is a market of one.

  
  
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  April 1999

  The Experience Economy: Work is Theater & Every Business a Stage

  With Every Business a Stage, authors Pine & Gilmore raise the curtain on competitive pricing strategies and reveal that businesses are missing their best opportunity for providing consumers with what they truly want: an experience.