Humans have an innate sense of what is fair, and our sense of fairness is apart from where we grow up, or how old we are, or what we believe.

When you behave in a way that’s counter to our intuitive sense of what is fair you create a terrible experience. We suffer an offence.

As products and services improve in quality to the point where there’s no perceivable difference in the spec between competitors, we will move to a new basis of competition. It’s the inevitable byproduct of companies in a market economy seeking to differentiate themselves, and experiences are one of the new frontiers.

The experience economy is one of the new bases of competition. We can already see evidence of it in our daily lives, and it’s becoming more and more common.

The great news is that an experience economy necessitates that firms behave well. When a firm behaves in a way that is unfair but sanctioned, sanctioned by their terms and conditions, sanctioned by the fine print, they can get away with it. Unless the way their customer experiences the interaction is a basis for competition.

An industrial system could get away with that. It could get away with it on the basis of size, scale, and scarcity. But that system is on its last legs.

In the experience economy firms must behave justly because the market demands it, and that’s a good thing for everyone, unless you’re an industrialist who doesn’t want to take a hard look at yourself.