An example of the development of a new product in tourism, and a core concept
of this book, is the idea of the product as an experience. This is different to
Gilbert’s (1990) idea of the tourism product as the total vacation experience; rather
in this case we are looking at specific tourism products developed and engineered
as ‘experiences’.
In 1982, Holbrook and Hirschman’s pioneering paper came up with the idea
of seeing consumer behaviour as seeking hedonic and aesthetic experiences
to add to the notion of consumer behaviour being purely about information
processing. This approach works well for tourism because, as tourism markets
mature, they seek authentic tourism products. Effectively, tourism sells a staged
experience, and suppliers and destinations are responding to this challenge by
delivering experience-based products. In 1999, the experiences concept saw two
important publications. Pine and Gilmore (1999) came up with the term ‘experience
economy’, whilst Schmitt (1999) published an influential paper on the idea
of experiential marketing with the focus upon consumers achieving pleasurable
experiences.
In the experience economy, changing values from older to younger generations
mean that consumers are seeking new meaning and self-actualisation in their
tourism consumption patterns as they move beyond material possessions and
services to experiences. Arnould et al. (2002) show that this consumption of the
tourism experience takes place over a stretched period of time and can be thought
of as taking place in four distinct stages:
1 The pre-consumption experience. This involves searching for information
about the experience, planning it, daydreaming about it and imagining the
experience.
2 The purchase experience. This derives from choosing the experience, paying for
it and packaging the encounter with the service delivered and the environment
where the experience takes place.
3 Core consumption experience. This takes place whilst the experience is performed
or delivered and includes the sensation of the experience, satisfaction or
dissatisfaction with it and the way that the experience transforms the consumer.