How a customer experiences a service clearly impacts on how that
customer will feel about the service provider and how he/she behaves
in the future. It is therefore, somewhat surprising that the concept of
customer experience has not, until recently, been at the forefront of
marketing theory and application. In industries where standardised
product offerings have led to a degree of commoditisation (where products
offered by competing companies are very similar, such as the airline
industry), Pine and Gilmore (1998) suggest that companies need
to provide “experiences” that lead to customer satisfaction. Experiential
differentiation is one area that companies operating in commodity markets
may achieve a brand space that is their own.