The importance of themes can be seen in the success that businesses that have identified a right theme for their business activity have attained. It is this right theme that gives customers something to associate with the business activities of the business enterprise. Very common examples of this are eateries that have identified a theme and built their business activities around such a theme. Customers coming to such eateries attracted by the theme put out like Hard Rock Café or the House of Blues and continue coming there because the experiences there have appealed to all the five senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste.
Chapter One on “Welcome to the Experience Economy” attempts to convey the message or argument that experiences are a clear and distinct economic offering and provides the means for future economic growth against stagnation since the agrarian economy and the scale economy of industrialization. The book starts with these words “Commoditized. No company wants that word applied to its goods or services”. (p.1). However, that is exactly what has happened. With the sole concentration on price there is hardly any differentiation between products and services and so margins crash. Coffee is a true commodity. Yet, it also offers to be a commodity, good, or service depending on the how customers can be made to attribute value to it. Sold as coffee beans it remains a commodity, but as coffee powder it becomes a good. However, sold in a restaurant the value of ambience lifts the value of a cup of coffee sold and provides a sensation of experience to the cup of coffee through teasing the senses, through theatre experience or the like and thus the value of the cup of coffee rises even further. This is the economic offering that experience offers and the basis of the experience economy of the authors.