This new challenge can be defined best as the management of the customer perception of authenticity. In an age when consumers want what’s real, this becomes the new business imperative, and success awaits those who gain an understanding of what’s real and what’s fake – or at least what elements contribute to forming such consumer perceptions – about the output generated from their own enterprises. This is the subject of Pine & Gilmore's latest book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want.

The Emergence and Steady Maturation of the Experience Economy
Just as the Industrial Economy supplanted the Agrarian Economy and was in turn supplanted by the Service Economy, we are now shifting to an Experience Economy. Good and services are no longer enough; they’re becoming mere commodities. The developed world’s predominant economic offering is fast becoming experiences – memorable events that engage each customer in an inherently personal way. Pine & Gilmore first described this fundamental shift in the very fabric of the economy in their 1997 Strategy & Leadership article “Beyond Goods and Services” and then fully detailed how companies could forestall commoditization by depicting and staging experiences in their 1999 book The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage.

Recognizing that even experiences could be commoditized, Pine & Gilmore further demonstrate that companies can use them as the basis for a fifth economic offering: transformations, where businesses guide their customers to achieve their aspirations. More recently, Pine & Gilmore have extended their ideas in the e-Doc, The Experience IS the Marketing, to show how any company can use experiences to generate demand for their offerings.

The Rise of Mass Customization
Customers don’t want choice – they simply want what they want. The advent of Mass Production allowed the average consumer to own a piece of the American dream at an affordable price, but at the expense of custom-tailored goods and services. Today, however, thanks to the swift evolution of technology and improved management processes, Mass Customization enables companies to create individually customized offerings at prices customers are willing to pay.

Joe Pine’s 1993 award-winning book Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition is considered the pre-eminent source on the subject, while subsequent writings such as Pine & Gilmore’s Harvard Business Review article "The Four Faces of Mass Customization" have extended the ideas to show how companies should respond to what has become an imperative in industry after industry. As consumers increasingly demand greater personalization in their lives, Mass Customization will become as important in the 21st century as Mass Production was in the 20th.