In 1999, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore offered this idea to readers as a new way to think about connecting with customers and securing their loyalty. As a result, their book "The Experience Economy" is now a classic, embraced by readers and companies worldwide and read in more than a dozen languages. And though the world has changed in many ways since then, the way to a customer's heart has not.

In fact, the idea of staging experiences to leave a memorable and lucrative impression is now more...

Contrived. Disingenuous. Phony.

Inauthentic. Do your customers use any of these words to describe what you sell--or how you sell it? If so, welcome to the club. Inundated by fakes and sophisticated counterfeits, people increasingly see the world in terms of real or fake.

They would rather buy something real from someone genuine rather than something fake from some phony. When deciding to buy, consumers judge an offering's (and a company's) authenticity as much as--if not more than--price, qua...