Joseph Pine: What consumers want

In the agrarian economy, there were commodities - the things you grow or raise or pull out of the ground, basically vegetables, animals, minerals that you then sell on the open marketplace. It's about supply and availability.

But the industrial revolution changed that. Then goods became economic offerings, where we used raw materials to manufacture goods. These goods became commoditised. They are treated like a commodity, and people don't care who makes them; they only care about the price.

The antidote to commoditisation is customisation. The customisation of a good turned it into a service because it was delivered on demand for a particular person. So we moved from an industrial economy to a service-based economy. It's all about improving quality.

Over the past 20odd years, services are being commoditised as well. It means that it's time to move to a new level of economic value beyond the goods and the services.

What we need at this point is to customize a service. When you customise a service you turn it into a memorable experience. So, we're shifting to an experience economy, where experiences are the predominant economic offering.

Experiences cannot be inauthentic, because it happens inside of us. Any authenticity is then becoming the new buying criteria for consumers.

No business can supply an authentic experience because all companies use machinery and are involved with money, making them inauthentic.

There are two dimensions to authenticity:

• Be true to yourself, which is self-directed.
• Be other-directed, which means being what you say you are to others.

The key to being true to yourself is knowing who you are as a business and what you've done in the past. 

When it comes to being what you say you are, companies can make the mistake of advertising what they're not. That is when you are perceived as fake.

To be authentic, provide places for people to experience who you are. For example, to know Starbucks, you have to go and experience them.

Authenticity can be summed up into three basic rules:

1. Don't say you're authentic if you're not.
2. It's easier to be authentic if you don't say you're authentic.
3. If you do say you're authentic, you have to be authentic.