The Authors

Joe Pine & Jim Gilmore co-founded Strategic Horizons LLP to help executives see the world differently. They scan contemporary culture and the changing economic landscape to provide insights about the Here-and-Now. They are not futurists (nor are they futurists’ sons); they are observers of the passing parade, with proven ability to detect the underlying structural shifts in the fabric of the economy. They possess a true knack for identifying these shifts in their infancy and then – often saying that the firm should have been named “Frameworks ‘R’ Us” – developing models that make sense of what is going on, explain it to those in business, and help them figure out what they need to do.

In 1993, while head of CSC Process Innovation practice, Gilmore read Joe’s first book, Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition, wrote a letter to him and enclosed a copy of Jim’s speaker demo tape, “Aaron the Shoeshine Man: What Every Business Can Learn from One Man’s Redesign of a Shine.” The two met, hit it off, and Joe was retained to work with Jim’s consulting practice (which already had been focusing on what how companies could efficiently customize to meet individual demand). And thus was born their collaboration, founded on the proposition that “Every customer is unique” and resulting in the edited volume of Harvard Business Review articles, Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value through Mass Customization.

Then in 1999, Pine & Gilmore wrote the book that spawned worldwide interest in experience design, customer experience management, and experiential marketing. Tom Peters called The Experience Economy “a brilliant, absolutely original book.” Now published in twelve languages, the book continues to find new readers across myriad industries as businesses find their goods and services commoditized, with customers increasingly spending their time and money on experiences – memorable events that engage them in an inherently personal way.

Now, with Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, the two define what authenticity means to the postmodern consumer and how companies must render authenticity to capture their hearts, minds, and dollars. They believe that this is but the first foray into developing a new management discipline that will determine success of failure for decades to come.