Experiences are built on top of services in the same way that services are built on top of goods. A service becomes an experience when it is personalized because customizing a service makes it memorable. An experience becomes its own economic offering when a company charges a customer admission or a subscription fee for the time he spent with that company on its experience. The value that is created by an experience is the person's internal reaction. Experiences have always been around, it's just that now we're beginning to recognize them as a distinct economic offering.
Entertainment is just one way to engage a customer.
An example of this is the Forum Shops in Las Vegas, where all of the stores are laid out on streets that look like an old Roman marketplace. Despite the fact that five or 10 minutes of every hour are basically lost, with no shopping done, the Forum Shops earn by far the highest dollar amount per square foot, three or four times that of the typical mall. There are also educational experiences, where the customer absorbs the events unfolding before him. Unlike entertainment, which passively engages an individual, education requires that he actively participate in the event in order to increase his knowledge or skills. An example of this is the Diamond Exchange, a thrice-yearly gathering of executives presented by Diamond Technology Partners, a consulting firm in Chicago.