Experience Inc.

We are living in what many marketers call an experience economy.

The articles do the rounds every few months as the latest and greatest in consumer insights. The headlines read nearly the same and focus almost exclusively on millennials, who seem to be shaping such an economy.

And what do millennials want?

Experiences over things.

It’s no secret why experiences are valued over material goods. Our economy today is an oversaturated one, with the number of brands in an ‘everyday’ category running up in the thousands.

Choice doesn’t mean as much as it used to. While once upon a time, consumers may have made product choices based on an affinity with a brand, purchases are now increasingly based on heuristic factors.

Heuristic decisions can be influenced by price, convenience, salience (or “bigness”), public approval, and in cases much less common than marketers like to believe, moral stance or ‘transparency’.

Brand affinity, or brand love – with a few rare exceptions pertaining to the truly massive, global brands – doesn’t mean what it once did. And the more oversaturated the market, the truer this sentiment becomes.

When the number of choices we have becomes overwhelming, we fall back on heuristics, or System 1 thinking, in order to reduce the mental fatigue that comes with evaluating every single option.

Experiences, on the other hand, have much more freedom of choice. They are not forced upon us in the way a lot of advertising is. We are free to choose what experiences we allow into our lives to shape and define who we are.

Marketers see this as a goldmine. If experiences define a person’s sense of self and allows them the freedom to choose, then surely advertising that provides an experience is much more effective than advertising that simply sells in an intrusive manner.

Intuitively, this makes sense. If a brand feels connected to a person’s identity, there is a much higher likelihood of brand affinity, which does drive sales.

But there’s a problem. Experiential advertising is still advertising, and all advertising is ­– in some form or another – pushed upon a consumer.

Of course, any chief marketing officer who specialises in ‘experiential marketing’ will deny this. They say that people can modify their environment, and therefore choose what advertising to let reach them.

To their credit, we are allowed some freedoms. We can mute the TV in ad-breaks, switch radio stations during commercials, adjust our filter settings on social media, and install adblockers to our devices.

But when corporate giants like Facebook adjust their algorithms to work around adblockers, or find new and covert manners of collecting personal information to target ads, it becomes clear that the idea behind ‘experiential marketing’ is one big farce.

Advertising is, and always will be, intrusive. It will always be pushed onto consumers. Without removing ourselves from society entirely, we can never remove ourselves from advertising.

Today, most people are aware that their personal data is being collected, stored, and used in order to personalise and target ads. Most of us are not entirely happy with this arrangement, but it’s the price we pay to navigate the digital sphere.

So it becomes a little insulting when marketers insist that selling experiences is the flip-side of intrusive advertising.

It becomes demeaning when marketers insist that people will choose to engage with their brand and show affinity to it, simply because a story or experiential element is attached to it.

All advertising is designed to sell. All consumers know this. 

So why insult consumers' intelligence by proclaiming that this is not the case? Why pretend that advertising serves a higher purpose of shaping our identity, and re-gifting us with the freedom to choose?

A brand experience, or brand story, will never make up for or replace a well-sold product.

When people say that they value experiences over things, we are not saying that we want the things we buy on a heuristic level to become experiential. That would be madness.

Heuristics make it easier for us to choose. Adding an experiential element to a product that we buy on a heuristic level adds another ‘step’ to the buying process, thus making it a more complicated procedure and running counter to every conclusion of behavioural and marketing science released in the last half-Century.

‘Experience over things’ simply means that we want to the freedom to choose what we allow into our lives to shape our identity. ‘Things’ are necessary to survive, but experiences give us life.

The only thing that ‘experiential marketing’ succeeds in doing is shifting the economy from an oversaturation of brands, to an oversaturation of brand stories.

And the more there is of something, the less valuable it becomes.

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