The Experience Premium Is Eating Everything

Brands built empires on goods. Now they're scrambling as consumers decide experiences matter more than ownership.

The data is unambiguous but most CMOs haven’t absorbed what it means. Luxury goods prices have collapsed 20% from their 2023 peak. The resale value of a Rolex is down nearly 30%. Fine wine auctions draw yawns. Meanwhile, a night at Le Bristol in Paris now costs twice what it did in 2019. Super Bowl ticket prices have doubled. Three-Michelin-star restaurant prices climbed 78% in a decade.

This isn’t a luxury problem. It’s an everything problem.

Deloitte’s research on consumer spending punctures a convenient myth that’s been circulating for years—that people are shifting from products to experiences. That narrative gives product marketers an excuse: we’re not failing, tastes are just changing. The truth is more complicated and less forgiving. Health care costs and retirement savings are eating household budgets. What’s left over increasingly flows to things that can’t be resold, copied, or faked.

McKinsey data shows Gen Z spending growing twice as fast as previous generations at the same age. By 2029, Gen Z will spend more globally than Boomers. By 2035, they’ll add $8.9 trillion to the economy. And what are they buying? 58% of Americans now say they’d rather spend money on experiences than material goods—14 points higher than the global average. That gap tells you where this is heading.

The scarcity shift nobody planned for

What changed isn’t consumer preferences. What changed is scarcity. Or more precisely, what counts as scarce.

A decade ago, access to premium goods signaled something meaningful. Limited production runs, exclusive boutiques, waitlists for handbags—these created artificial scarcity that brands monetized effectively. Then three things happened simultaneously: lab-grown alternatives became indistinguishable from originals, second-hand marketplaces made “exclusive” goods available to anyone with internet access, and global supply chains made premium manufacturing ubiquitous.

The result: scarcity moved from goods to moments. You can’t buy a second-hand day at Wimbledon’s Centre Court. You can’t manufacture a reservation at a fully booked restaurant. You can’t download the experience of being one of 200 people swimming in a rooftop pool overlooking Paris. These things are genuinely finite.

Thorstein Veblen’s century-old framework on conspicuous consumption still holds, but what’s conspicuous has migrated. Luxury used to mean owning things others couldn’t afford. Now it means accessing experiences others can’t replicate. The Palm Beach housekeepers making $150,000 annually aren’t aberrations—they’re signals. Service providers with genuine skill at the high end now command compensation that would make software engineers jealous.

Where product marketing goes to die

The transition creates a crisis for marketing organizations built around product velocity. Most teams spent the past 15 years optimizing conversion funnels, perfecting attribution models, reducing cost per acquisition. The assumption was simple: better marketing leads to more product sales leads to more revenue.

That model breaks when the thing people want isn’t a product.

Experiential marketing investment is surging—51% of companies plan increases through 2026, with Fortune 1000 marketers expecting budgets to rise 74%. B2C companies alone will spend over $90 billion on experiential this year, up 10% from last. But most brands are just rebranding existing tactics. A pop-up store isn’t an experience. A sampling event isn’t an experience. These are product marketing in physical form.

Real experiential marketing requires rethinking what’s being sold. Glow Recipe’s Seoul-inspired pop-up didn’t just distribute samples—it let participants curate custom kits, making each visit unique. That’s the model: variable outcomes based on individual choices, creating moments worth discussing. The metric isn’t samples distributed. It’s stories told.

The brands figuring this out understand three uncomfortable truths. First, experiences can’t scale the way products do without destroying what makes them valuable. Second, attribution becomes nearly impossible when the purchase decision happens weeks or months after the experience. Third, the customer lifetime value of experience-based marketing looks like nothing in traditional models because the value compounds through social proof and word-of-mouth in ways spreadsheets don’t capture.

Retail’s bifurcation

Consumer behavior data from Placer.ai shows the middle collapsing. Discount retailers and off-price stores saw traffic climb 30% above 2019 levels in early 2025. Premium experiences exceed pre-pandemic levels. Everything in between is declining. Department stores and mid-tier brands face existential questions.

The winners aren’t the ones with better product assortments. They’re the ones giving people reasons to show up that have nothing to do with buying things. Top Golf exceeds pre-pandemic traffic. Museums stabilize. Movie theaters spike only when there’s a genuine cultural event. Consumers spread shopping across multiple stores, cherry-picking specific items from each. Brand loyalty to retailers is dead. What survives is loyalty to experiences that can’t be replicated elsewhere.

This shows up in where foot traffic concentrates. Car washes saw the biggest visit spike, followed by theaters, music venues, and attractions. Not because Americans suddenly care more about clean cars, but because these represent moments—small experiences woven into routines. The grocery store isn’t just inventory. It’s the 15-minute escape. The coffee shop isn’t caffeine delivery. It’s the third place between home and work.

McKinsey’s research shows consumers are still trading down, but not by buying less or switching to discount retailers. Instead, 79% are hunting for deals on every purchase, and 49% delay purchases. They’re not broke. They’re selective. And increasingly, they’re selective about allocating discretionary income to things that create memories rather than fill closets.

The measurement catastrophe

For marketing teams, this transition breaks measurement frameworks that took decades to build. Performance marketing optimized for product conversion becomes less effective when the decision isn’t “which product” but “what experience deserves discretionary spending.”

Attribution modeling assumes a funnel. But experiential marketing creates a cloud. Someone attends an event. Six months later they make a purchase. Was the event causal? Maybe. Probably. Impossible to prove. Multi-touch attribution gives different answers than last-click, which differs from incrementality testing, which differs from brand lift studies. CFOs want ROI metrics. CMOs can’t provide them using existing models.

The brands adapting fastest are building community-first, transaction-second structures. They’re running experiential activations not as one-off events but as ongoing programs creating belonging. They’re partnering with creators who give audiences access to experiences they couldn’t get otherwise. They’re recognizing that their job isn’t selling products but creating contexts in which products become part of memorable moments.

This requires humility many organizations don’t have. It means admitting that brand tracking studies, conversion optimization, and performance marketing—the entire apparatus of modern marketing—captures only part of what drives revenue. The part that’s becoming less important.

What happens next

Three predictions grounded in current trajectories:

Brand spending on experiential will outpace traditional product marketing within 18 months for consumer-facing categories. Not because marketers choose it, but because board-level pressure on CAC and LTV forces the conversation about alternatives.

Attribution modeling will fragment into two separate practices—short-term performance measurement for direct response, and long-term brand equity tracking that acknowledges experiences create compounding value the way products can’t.

The brands that survive will be those that internalize a hard truth: every customer interaction—even digital ones—needs to feel like something that couldn’t have happened any other way. The bar for “worth my time” has risen. Meeting it requires rethinking marketing as experience design rather than message distribution.

The luxury market figured this out by watching its goods business crater while services boomed. The rest of us are just slower learners.