Do you ever find yourself doing something intuitively?

Did you ever take an idea and run with it? Only to realize almost by accident that you have created something of value, that people really love and want more of what you have to offer and you’ve tweaked & developed a formula that if you follow it and really understand it, works time and time again.

That’s what happened as I started to develop my own flavour of themed events. It’s what led a magazine journalist to call me “Queen of Extraordinary Experiences” and what a guest said in a review, “its like dinner theatre only with good food!”
 
Little did I realize at the time that my business was becoming a part of the Experience Economy.

As I went deep with our (British) theme and started to offer tours of the UK, with one-of-a-kind experiences planned for each day, in a totally immersive 7 day cultural extravaganza, I realized that I really understood this concept. Not because I had read a book. But because it made my heart sing and it came so naturally to me.
 
I heard a little girl tell her Grandmother that she wanted to have one of my experiences with her with her Grandmother for her birthday rather than buy her anything!
 
We’ve had fairies and real unicorns at tea service events. Snape and the sorting hat at a famous British wizards birthday feast (he who can not be named). Dinner with Mr Darcy. And even a Hobbit and a Mad Hatter.

We did a WWII history events for a local schools, together with family artefacts from the era. And Manners & Etiquette classes for 1st graders became an annual event.
 
Then I started to read articles that started talking about the Experience Economy and that a book had been published back in 1999 and republished in 2012. I realized that I had always known about the concept of “experiential marketing”.

In fact, when I ran my  Home Staging business in the UK, we partnered with home shows around the country to provide features. A strategy I still found worked in my USA based businesses having created a featured Princess Tea in exchange for my booth.
 
I was even asked to speak on the topic at conferences for the hospitality industry.
 
Then I picked up the book titled ‘The Experience Economy’ and started to read it. According the the book, you need to incorporate these four areas into these ‘experiences’:
 

1. Entertainment - check
2. Education - check
3. Escapism - check
4. Esthetic – check

Being British in America and really loving all the differences we have across the two cultures, gave me a perspective, passion and purpose to take this concept out into the world to help others to up-level or recreate an extraordinary experience for their businesses, guests, clients, VIPS and teams.