Mix in memorabilia.
Certain goods have always been purchased primarily for the memories they convey. Vacationers buy postcards to evoke a treasured sight, golfers purchase a shirt or cap with an embroidered logo to recall a course or round, and teenagers obtain T-shirts to remember a rock concert. They purchase such memorabilia as a physical reminder of an experience.
People already spend tens of billions of dollars every year on memorabilia. These goods generally sell at price points far above those commanded by similar items that don’t represent an experience. A Rolling Stones concert-goer, for example, will pay a premium for an official T-shirt emblazoned with the date and city of the concert. That’s because the price points are a function less of the cost of goods than of the value the buyer attaches to remembering the experience.
If airlines truly sold experiences, more passengers would actually shop in the seat-pocket catalogs for mementos of their flight.
If service businesses like airlines, banks, grocery stores, and insurance companies find no demand for memorabilia, it’s because they do not stage engaging experiences. But if these businesses offered themed experiences layered with positive cues and devoid of negative cues, their guests would want and would pay for memorabilia to commemorate their experiences. (If guests didn’t want to, it probably would mean the experience wasn’t great.) The special agents of the Geek Squad, for example, stage such a distinctive computer-repair experience that customers buy T-shirts and lapel pins from the company’s Web site. If airlines truly were in the experience-staging business, more passengers would actually shop in those seat-pocket catalogs for appropriate mementos. Likewise, mortgage loans