This text seeks to raise the curtain on competitive pricing strategies and asserts that businesses often miss their best opportunity for providing consumers with what they want - an experience. It presents a strategy for companies to script and stage the experiences provided by their products.

The book develops a new approach to urban development in which leisure, pleasure or experiences are seen as key drivers. History, authenticity, urban qualities, local culture and leisure offerings or a vibrant retail sector are thus assets in local development also outside of the big cities. Globalization and high mobility are necessary aspects of the development, which entails the development of high urban profiles in a globalized and highly competitive world. Apart from experiential qualities a critical urban size, is also required. Experience qualities can be connected to urban design, where particular designs stimulate citizens’ learning and activity in the urban space. They can also be connected to more tourist related large scale projects of experiential mass consumption with fun parks and shopping. A combination of the two approaches has been developed to promote for example car brands and cities through experiential car museums. New stakeholders, new network based forms of cooperation and new entrepreneurial strategies are connected to urban development in ‘the experience economy'. In particular new network based approaches are needed if small and rural places should also reap the fruits of the experience economy. This book was originally published as a special issue of European Planning Studies.

Time is limited. Attention is scarce. Are you engaging your customers? Apple Stores, Disney, LEGO, Starbucks. Do these names conjure up images of mere goods and services, or do they evoke something more--something visceral? Welcome to the Experience Economy, where businesses must form unique connections in order to secure their customers' affections--and ensure their own economic vitality. This seminal book on experience innovation by Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore explores how savvy companies excel by offering compelling experiences for their customers, resulting not only in increased customer allegiance but also in a more profitable bottom line. Translated into thirteen languages, The Experience Economy has become a must-read for leaders of enterprises large and small, for-profit and nonprofit, global and local. Now with a brand-new preface, Pine and Gilmore make an even stronger case for experiences as the critical link between a company and its customers in an increasingly distractible and time-starved world. Filled with detailed examples and actionable advice, The Experience Economy helps companies create personal, dramatic, and even transformative experiences, offering the script from which managers can generate value in ways aligned with a strong customer-centric strategy.

This illuminating Handbook presents the state of the art in the scientific field of experience economy studies. It offers a rich and varied collection of contributions that discuss different issues of crucial importance for our understanding of the exp

Architecture as imprint, as brand, as the new media of transformation—of places, communities, corporations, and people. In the twenty-first century, we must learn to look at cities not as skylines but as brandscapes and at buildings not as objects but as advertisements and destinations. In the experience economy, experience itself has become the product: we're no longer consuming objects but sensations, even lifestyles. In the new environment of brandscapes, buildings are not about where we work and live but who we imagine ourselves to be. In Brandscapes, Anna Klingmann looks critically at the controversial practice of branding by examining its benefits, and considering the damage it may do. Klingmann argues that architecture can use the concepts and methods of branding—not as a quick-and-easy selling tool for architects but as a strategic tool for economic and cultural transformation. Branding in architecture means the expression of identity, whether of an enterprise or a city; New York, Bilbao, and Shanghai have used architecture to enhance their images, generate economic growth, and elevate their positions in the global village. Klingmann looks at different kinds of brandscaping today, from Disneyland, Las Vegas, and Times Square—prototypes and case studies in branding—to Prada's superstar-architect-designed shopping epicenters and the banalities of Niketown. But beyond outlining the status quo, Klingmann also alerts us to the dangers of brandscapes. By favoring the creation of signature buildings over more comprehensive urban interventions and by severing their identity from the complexity of the social fabric, Klingmann argues, today's brandscapes have, in many cases, resulted in a culture of the copy. As experiences become more and more commodified, and the global landscape progressively more homogenized, it falls to architects to infuse an ever more aseptic landscape with meaningful transformations. How can architects use branding as a means to differentiate places from the inside out—and not, as current development practices seem to dictate, from the outside in? When architecture brings together ecology, economics, and social well-being to help people and places regain self-sufficiency, writes Klingmann, it can be a catalyst for cultural and economic transformation.

Interior design can be considered a discipline that ranks among the worlds of art, design, and architecture and provides the cognitive tools to operate innovatively within the spaces of the contemporary city that require regeneration. Emerging trends in design combine disciplines such as new aesthetic in the world of art, design in all its ramifications, interior design as a response to more than functional needs, and as the demand for qualitative and symbolic values to be added to contemporary environments. Cultural, Theoretical, and Innovative Approaches to Contemporary Interior Design is an essential reference source that approaches contemporary project development through a cultural and theoretical lens and aims to demonstrate that designing spaces, interiors, and the urban habitat are activities that have independent cultural foundations. Featuring research on topics such as contemporary space, mass housing, and flexible design, this book is ideally designed for interior designers, architects, academics, researchers, industry professionals, and students.

Contemporary architecture of theme-based design is examined in this book, leading to a new understanding of architecture's role in the increasingly diversified consumer environment. It explores the ‘Experience Economy’ to reveal how everyday environments strategically and opportunistically blur our leisure, work, and personal life experiences. Considering scientific design research, consumer psychology, and Hollywood story-telling techniques, the book looks at how the design of theme parks, casinos, and shopping malls has influenced our more unexpectedly themed spaces, from the city to the hospital. Widely taking architecture as a social practice, this text is of relevance to all cultural and sociological studies in the built and material environment.