Hospitality Design - October 2010 - 56

perspectives

interview: joe pine and jim gilmore

Left: The dramatic glass box entrance of the Apple store on 5th Avenue in New York.

Just like, the year before you received our award, we gave it to Robert Stevens of the Geek Squad, when he had less than two dozen special agents in his computer repair business. It doesn’t get much more mundane than that. But by applying all the principles of experience staging, the Geek Squad now has over 20,000 special agents in their black and white Geekmobiles, ﬂashing badges, and creating memorable experiences. If you can learn to do it with a housekeeping cart, you can learn to do it with your entire hotel. CC: Your most recent book is called Authenticity. Explain why there’s such a trend toward authenticity, and how is that woven into the design of a hotel, restaurant, or spa? JG: The more the world is intentionally staged, is more and more mediated, where people are paying to go to American Girl Place, or the guy who ﬁxes your computer looks like law you the Experience Stager of the Year Award, Chip, was because we consider you the best themer in the world. CC: Oh, thanks. Please explain good theming versus bad theming. JG: You use magazines as an organizing principle and that’s what gives your spaces integrity. It’s hard to watch any design show on HGTV today that doesn’t have that same sort of methodology for design inspiration. Right? Well, that’s theming, whether you call it that or not. And not just the place overall, but the principle of theming places inside of places. Let’s give kudos to [Ian] Schrager here. The re-invention of hotel lobbies, that were once places where people simply met to leave, which is what they were, to instead be places to congregate, stay and have an experience. CC: Can you talk about any trends in the hospitality industry that have become more experience-driven in the 21st century? And what would you love to see the industry do that we currently don’t offer? JG: I often use, as an iconic example of the experience economy, the Gumball Wizard. It’s a gumball dispensing machine where you put your coin in, and the gumball spirals around and around and around. There’s no traditional functional reason for that. It’s not a better gumball. It’s worse service, as it takes you longer to get your order. It’s about the gumball spiraling experience that’s wrapped around the traditional offering. To me, the gumball machine of the hospitality industry is the housekeeping cart. Even if you want to just do it just for practice, to practice all the principles and tools that we put forth in The Experience Economy, get a team together, and see if you can learn how to make the cart so engaging that people want to buy a miniature of it in the gift shop. And I don’t really care so much about the housekeeping cart. What I really care about is learning the skills needed in order to take something that’s mundane and turn it into something memorable. CC: Any last thoughts on your ultimate dream hotel? JP: An ultimate dream hotel would recognize not only who I am as an individual, it would recognize what market I happen to be in at the moment. Because when I travel alone on business, I want one thing from my hotel; when I travel with my wife, I want a second thing; when I bring the kids along, a third thing; when it’s not business, it’s personal, a fourth thing. There are multiple markets within me, so stop treating me like a mass market and identify who I am and what I need. CC: So the ultimate hotel is a mind reader. JP: Exactly. enforcement, this creates the desire for authentic and real. And so we hang this point of view on our foundational model, the progressional economic value: when you go from commodities to goods to services to experiences, we argue in Authenticity, that that gives rise to a new dominant consumer sensibility—a new reason to buy. And so in the agrarian economy, the dominant reason to buy was availability. If it was available, you’re going to buy it. It was with the industrial economy, that’s when cost emerged. That mass production brought down the cost of goods, that nearly everybody could afford to buy one of every physical thing they wanted. With the rise of the service economy, that’s when quality emerged. You pay somebody else to cut your hair, mow your lawn, change your oil. You care about the performance of the quality of the offering. And now with an experience economy, people want real; they want authentic, which we deﬁne as buying on the basis of conforming to self-image. Virginia Postrel explains this well in her book, The Substance of Style, which if your readers have not read, they should. She says if consumers today purchase something, they say, ‘I like that, I am like that.’

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Hospitality Design - October 2010