Digital wine tastings and coHow is the experience economy developing?

15 October 2024

The trend is clear: in Western societies, people are spending less money on vacuum cleaners and washing machines - and more on experiences such as food tastings.

Experiences have become a billion-dollar business worldwide. In Germany, too, consumers now invest more money in travel and other leisure activities than they spend on goods. A study by the University of Hamburg examines how the industry is developing, in particular through new links between physical experiences and digital technologies.

The taste of a red wine, the mood of a group of people or the temperature in a sauna: these impressions are difficult to convey digitally. “On the other hand, consumers are increasingly demanding digitalized experiences, especially since the coronavirus pandemic,” explains Jan Recker, Nucleus Professor of Information Systems and Digital Innovation at the University of Hamburg. “These offer different impressions than purely physical experiences and often also practical and social benefits such as convenience, scheduling flexibility or security.”

Together with his team, Recker therefore examined the offerings of seven German event organizers. They offer both physical and digitalized experiences that have an emotional and sensory value: from painting workshops to cooking courses or city tours to yoga classes. If parts of these experiences are presented digitally, participants rate the value higher the more different senses are addressed - this has been the experience of providers in recent years.

Physical-digital offers attract new customer groups

As a result, event organizers are now looking for innovative ways to change their products and combine physical and digital components in new ways. “To do this, however, they need to know exactly which components form the core of an experience, which can be sensibly and sensory expediently digitalized and which should continue to be offered in physical form,” explains Recker. One example is sending key components to participants' homes. For a digital tasting, for example, they receive chocolate samples or gin miniatures to ensure rich sensory stimulation during the event.

“By creating physical-digital offerings with different architectures and strategically orchestrating both traditional physical and digital offerings, all of the companies we examined have improved their value creation,” says Recker, summarizing the results of the study. “They have opened up new market segments and now also serve business customers alongside private customers, for example.” They also found that physical and digitalized offerings do not cannibalize each other. Both serve different experience requirements - in many places, customers book both the classic on-site experience and the digitalized experience at home.

 (English version of https://www.uni-hamburg.de/newsroom/exzellenzstrategie/2024/1015-erlebnisoekonomie.html)