The Consumption Experience—Something New, Something Old, Something Borrowed, Something Sold: Part 3

scholarly research. And, it appears, never the twain shall meet. Thus, the back of the dust jacket positions CEM as “a comprehensive tool for connecting with customers at every touch-point”—with supplementary endorsements from some impressively credentialed folks who agree that if making the experiential perspective practical is your aim, Schmitt is your game. Interestingly, as the name-of-thegame featured on the inside-front flap of the cover, experience has transmogrified into a univocally favorable term for something that should be maximized. The blurb promises that the book “introduces the five-step CEM process that you can use to connect with your customers at every touchpoint. ” Modestly, it claims, “CEM offers powerful solutions for virtually any type of business challenge. ” In other words, a universal touchy-feely toolkit. Schmitt acknowledges in his “Preface” that the chief objective of CEM is to translate the concepts from his earlier best-selling published-in-more-than-ten-languages book on Experiential Marketing (Schmitt 1999) into a “five-step process for managing your customer’s experience” (p. v)—a tool that any reader willing to shell out $27.95 plus tax can use to achieve profits for the company and success on the job. As background, Schmitt explicitly but inexplicably takes credit for precipitating the experiential revolution: “When I wrote Experiential Marketing, ‘experience’was a new term” (p. vi). But thanks to Schmitt and his followers (whom he lists and who include some of the other authors reviewed in the present four-installment essay), “experience is now a word in every manager’s vocabulary”: “Managers are beginning to understand the importance of focusing on the customer experience and doing so in an integrative fashion” (p. vi). Toward this end they need help via the study of case examples such as those developed by Schmitt in his consultancy work as CEO of the EX Group during the past five years. Judging from the list of cases he presents in this volume, this five-year period must have been pretty busy: Carnegie Hall, BP Connect, Jamba Juice, Cingular Wireless, Citigroup, Prada, NikePark, Hilton, Apple Computers, and Amazon.com. I’m exhausted just thinking, let alone reading, about it. This review presents Part 3 of a four-part essay that covers the recent burgeoning crop of managerial self-help books on the subject of experiential marketing. Specifically, beginning with the last two issues and continuing through the next issue of the Journal of Macromarketing in a series of four installments, this review essay explores marketing applications and macromarketing repercussions of the consumption experience as something new, something old, something borrowed, and—most of all, in the hands of the experiential marketing gurus—something sold. In this connection, what can I say about the latest work by a good friend and talented colleague, brand-identity consultant and experiential guru Bernd Schmitt, who dwells in the same crazy-making idea factory that I inhabit up at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business and who currently occupies my former office in 510 Uris Hall? I am convinced that Bernd now channels the same cosmic forces of inspiration from which I benefited when I sat in the location where he now resides while Beth Hirschman and I worked on our “Fantasies, Feelings, and Fun” (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982) and “Hedonic Consumption” (Hirschman and Holbrook 1982) papers a quarter-century ago. From those sources of cosmic inspiration, not to mention his own wealth of creative insight and imaginative understanding (Schmitt 1999), Bernd has now composed two new experiential masterpieces—the first entitled Customer Experience Management: A Revolutionary Approach to Connecting with Your Customers and the second entitled There’s No Business That’s Not Show Business: Marketing in an Experience Culture (coauthored with David L. Rogers and Karen Vrotsos).