Enriching the customer experience: Implications for E-marketers

The significance of 'customer experience' on the Internet has been increasingly emphasized by both practitioners and academicians. However, they have used the term 'customer experience' in many different ways with little consensus about what experience really means and what its full implications are. Based on Pine and Gilmore's experiential framework (1999), this paper attempts to sort out online customer experiences into four broad categories: entertainment, education, estheticism, and escape. Each of the four dimensions is reviewed and applied to the context of e-marketing. The authors conclude the discussion by stating that not all goods and services should be marketed as experiences in order to be successful on the Internet.