[PART 1] How Experiential Commerce is Reshaping Purchasing Decisions
This note draws on The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life, Wiley 2024, and in particular on Chapter 10, Reimagining Commercial DNA. It opens a three part series on the future of customer centric marketing.
Synopsis
Institutions tend to notice a change in their market only after that change has already repriced them. The basis of competition has moved from what a company makes toward the cumulative experience a customer has with it, and I named that shift Experiential Commerce. It carries implications for what customers expect, how companies deliver value to them and how they face off against competitors, because it reflects a redefinition of value in the eyes of customers.
What follows is an argument about marketing, which has been measured on the formation of intent and almost never on its survival. Under Experiential Commerce the factors that decide a purchase sit largely outside the places marketing controls, which leaves the discipline with instruments narrower than its accountability. The constructive answer is an experience-led growth strategy. Pharma is the hardest version of the same problem, and the final section points at where that case is already made.
The ground under global commerce has moved
Picture global commerce and most people still see factories, assembly lines and container ships. That picture gets less accurate every year, because the backbone of the economy is now intangible value exchanged through services, interactions and human experiences. Physical goods still matter, and the functional utility of a product still has to hold. What changed is that experiential attributes can now carry equal or greater significance than the core product itself in the hearts and minds of customers.
Emphasis is now placed on the cumulative experience a customer has with a company. That underscores the primacy of the underlying factors that drive Experiential Commerce, shape customer expectations and influence their decisions. Experiential factors are the intangible, emotionally focused aspects of a company's proposition, and they include helpfulness, consistency, personalization, simplicity and transparency. They arrive through complex ecosystems of in person and digital interactions, which is why no single function owns them.
Experiential factors now decide the close
Consider the last purchase anyone made between two near identical options. Product and brand earned both of them a place on the shortlist, and something else closed it. The close often turns on how easy the buying was, how the customer was treated and what happened after the money changed hands. Those are experiential factors, and in a crowded market they frequently work as the tiebreaker.
Product and brand remain essential. They have simply stopped being sufficient. In my book the value proposition stands on three legs, product, brand and experience, and the third is the one most companies never deliberately built. Experience in those companies is left to default while the other two are carefully designed.
Expectations no longer respect industry borders
Customers now carry the same expectation into every interaction regardless of category. Applying for a mortgage, grocery shopping and the other jobs of daily life all get judged by one standard. Across mobile, in person, phone, chatbot or blended channels, customers expect and in some cases demand a similar level of convenience. Expectations and definitions of value are increasingly set outside industry boundaries by a small number of customer experience outliers. A company therefore no longer competes only against the firms it benchmarks itself against.
That is why cross-industry comparison deserves more respect than it usually gets inside planning cycles. The outliers reset the standard of business for everyone, and they manage it without ever entering anyone else's category. I learned that lesson years before I worked in pharma, at The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center. The Credo there holds that the genuine care and comfort of guests is "our highest mission." A company that sells rooms and a company that sells therapies are measured by customers against the same accumulated memory.
Positivity bias flattens the value proposition
The sharpest consequence of this shift is a cognitive one, and it rarely gets the attention it deserves. Positivity bias is the tendency for people to lump competing options together into a generic, overly optimistic category of sameness. It grants some benefit of the doubt to every option, good or bad, which equalizes the playing field and makes real differences hard to discern.
Companies work hard to influence, cajole, inspire, guide and otherwise compel customers to prefer them. Customers are nonetheless often left with the mistaken impression that all companies involved in a lifecycle decision are generally positive and generally the same. That is the cognitive cocktail that marginalizes, homogenizes and commoditizes value propositions. It quietly counteracts expensive brand messaging, and what remains is head to head competition over features, functions and price.
Positivity bias is also why a campaign can test well and still fail to move preference. The cumulative experience is what builds the mental scorecard customers use to rank companies against each other. Each positive or negative interaction gets noted and assigned a value, mostly below the level of conscious thought. Preference is therefore earned in the interactions and only confirmed in the messaging.
Marketing is measured on intent, not on its survival
Marketing has long been accountable for the formation of intent and almost never for what happens to that intent afterward. The discipline is measured on awareness, consideration, message recall, campaign response and share of voice. Every one of those instruments sits upstream of the moment a customer discovers whether the promise was kept. Under Experiential Commerce the factors that decide a purchase sit largely outside the places marketing controls.
That gap is a design gap rather than a character gap. Marketers are not failing at their jobs, and the people doing the work deserve respect. The instruments they were handed are narrower than the accountability they carry, which makes this a structural problem rather than a performance one. No function can be held to the survival of a promise it has no visibility into.
An experience-led growth strategy is the constructive answer
An experience-led growth strategy closes that gap, and three features distinguish it from a conventional customer experience plan. First, it must be a subset of corporate strategy rather than something created in a vacuum, which means it flows from enterprise mission and objectives before laddering down to measurement. Second, it must name the experiential battlefields a company chooses to compete on beyond its core products, based on its own view of the customer and the opportunity landscape.
Third, it must drive revenue across every stage of the lifecycle rather than sit in post-purchase operations. That last feature is the one most often lost in execution. When experience work stays confined to service recovery it can only repair value, never create it. Done properly, it turns functions long treated as cost centers into contributors to growth.
The supporting economics are not exotic. Research on customer effort reports that customers who find a company easy to deal with are 61% more likely to stay. Work behind the customer experience index reports that customer obsessed companies saw 41% faster revenue growth than the rest. Neither figure settles the question of causation, though both point in a single direction.
Pharma is the hardest case for this argument
Every industry feels this shift. Pharma feels it hardest. The manufacturer controls almost none of the interactions that decide whether its promise is kept. Coverage review, prior authorization, pharmacy pickup, onboarding, titration and persistence all happen inside systems the manufacturer does not own. Scientific value is realized when the patient accesses, starts, continues and benefits, not when the script is written.
The evidence that experience carries the decision holds even where safety and efficacy govern the choice. Research on pharma commercial productivity found that about 40% of a doctor's drug recommendations relate to overall experience, and that physicians who rate a company highly are 2.3 to 2.7 times more likely to prescribe its products. Those findings describe a market where the experiential layer already carries a measurable share of clinical choice. The third leg of the value proposition is the one the industry never built.
Two measures carry the weight of that argument in my practice. The standard a patient applies is Consumer-Grade, which is a structural specification rather than an aspiration. The measure of whether a promise was kept is the Realization Rate, the ratio of realized value to earned value. Launch excellence, marketing excellence and sales excellence are mature domains in pharma, and Customer Excellence is the fourth and missing one.
That case is made in full elsewhere, so this piece only points at it. What belongs in Part 1 is the prior claim it rests on. Value is not created when an organization makes a promise, it is created when the customer can actually realize it.
Key Takeaways
- Experiential Commerce describes a redefinition of value, where the cumulative experience a customer has with a company increasingly decides lifecycle decisions.
- Experiential factors such as helpfulness, consistency, personalization, simplicity and transparency are the intangible drivers that shape expectations and influence decisions.
- Positivity bias leaves customers with the mistaken impression that competing companies are generally positive and generally the same, which commoditizes value propositions.
- Marketing has been measured on the formation of intent and almost never on its survival, which leaves its instruments narrower than its accountability.
- An experience-led growth strategy must sit inside corporate strategy, name the experiential battlefields a company chooses, and drive revenue across the whole lifecycle.
- Pharma is the hardest case, because the manufacturer controls almost none of the interactions that decide whether its scientific promise gets realized.
Diagnostic Questions to Consider
- Describe how your organization measures experiential factors today, compared with how rigorously it measures product and brand factors.
- Identify the stages of the lifecycle where marketing has real visibility into whether a promise survived contact with delivery.
- Name the experiential battlefields the company has deliberately chosen to compete on beyond its core products and indications.
- Estimate the share of preference in your category that forms inside interactions the commercial organization does not control.
- State who is accountable when intent gets formed correctly and value is never realized by the customer.
Closing Reflection
The shift described here is a redefinition of value rather than a passing marketing fashion. It changes what customers expect, how value reaches them and how companies separate themselves from one another. Marketing is the function most exposed by that change, because it carries accountability for preference without owning most of the places where preference now forms.
My own reading is that the discipline is far from disposable. It is under-instrumented, which is a different problem with a different remedy. The remedy is to extend marketing's field of view across the whole lifecycle and to give it measurement that makes experiential factors visible, fundable and defensible. Part 2 of this series takes up that question directly.
Experiential Commerce was the frame I used to describe this change when I wrote about it, and it remains the clearest way to name what moved. Where the argument travels next, in pharma especially, is toward the mechanics of realization. That is the work the rest of the series takes on.
About the Author
Wayne Simmons is the founder of The Customer Excellence AGENCY and the author of The Customer Excellence Enterprise (Wiley, 2024). He is founding faculty of the MS in Customer Experience Management at Michigan State University's Broad College of Business. He led global customer excellence in Pfizer's first Chief Marketing Organization and in Bayer's Customer Powerhouse.
The Customer Excellence Agency: Advancing the Pursuit of Excellence in Service of Science.
