From the Catalog — This is an archive issue, originally published on Medium in October 2019. It’s the first in a two-part series; the companion piece — on 2020 visual trends and how they actually played out — is also available here on Substack. I’m migrating my early writing as I sunset Medium. The ideas felt worth preserving.

With the publication of The Experience Economy in 1998, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore described a history of economic progress and proposed that experiences had recently emerged from services to become a distinct economic offering all their own.

In the era of the experience economy, brand marketers needed to facilitate experiences to drive the value of their products. Starbucks emerged from this period to serve as a kind of third space between home and work. You weren’t just going to Starbucks to get a cup of coffee, but to enjoy the environment and ambient mood that a Starbucks store was designed to provide.

Now, thanks in great part to Instagram, we’ve entered a new era where our experiences exist only as a means to create images that we can project into the world to elevate and shape perceptions about ourselves.

This means that brands are challenged not only to interact with individual consumers, but with customers who are consciously creating their own personal brands through the images they create and project — about where they go, who they’re with, how they dress, and how they spend their time. Many consumers have become aware that they must act as the publishers and publicists of their own stories.

For a product marketer, this means that while the role of the brand in the experience economy was to serve as the stager of an experience for the customer, in the era of the image economy, the brand serves as an enabler of the customer’s image. The marketer must now consider that the very image a brand creates for the customer — however superficial and transient — is the product.

Art and creative imagery originally existed in sacred places and were meant to communicate ideas and spark contemplation.

In today’s image economy, digital photography makes both the creation and distribution of images cheap and disposable, and has led to endless hours of thumb-scrolling through homogeneous imagery. This surplus of digital photography has made it more difficult for any one image to break through in the culture and make an impact.

2003 — Artist Olafur Eliasson debuted his Weather Project in the Great Hall at the Tate Modern in London. In a time before social media and image sharing, Weather Project created a unique space where people could enter as complete strangers, experience the artwork, and feel a sense of connection to the art and to the people around them.

2004–2005 — Facebook launched, followed by MySpace, and these platforms quickly became a breeding ground for teenage self-portraiture and the display of group imagery from recent vacations and shared experiences.

2007 — As recently as this year, the long lines for selfies at Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms installations in art museums around the world were still yet to come — but the launch of the iPhone that year would quickly change all that.

2009 — Culture had shifted enough that on season three of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Kim stopped to take a selfie on her way to jail. Even at this early stage, people were actively documenting experiences to share and have others value.

2010 — With the launch of Instagram, the focus on imagery and its sharing — both for its own sake and for monetization — only accelerated.

2014 — Ellen DeGeneres took her infamous Oscar selfie. A magazine cover of Kim Kardashian “broke the internet.” The selfie had fully arrived as a cultural artifact.

In 2015, Refinery29 created 29Rooms, an experiential event that gave individuals permission to be out in the world with camera phones and to be shameless in the pursuit of a selfie.

Taking this trend to the extreme, we saw the emergence of so-called content farms — for-profit, pop-up “Instagrammable” museums such as the Dream Factory and the Museum of Ice Cream. Temporary places built solely for selfies and social media content, but devoid of any other cultural significance.

As these Instagrammable experiences became mainstream, they allowed visitors to create and exchange meaning with others simply by being present in these spaces and documenting themselves in them.

The paradox we face in the era of the image economy is that lack of meaning is more, and that brands can put out imagery that doesn’t have to communicate anything substantive — as long as it contains relevant cultural signifiers, however superficial they may be.

This was the first in a two-part series, based in part on a presentation by Alexander Tran on The New Image Economy at NeueHouse in Hollywood in October 2019. The companion piece — on the visual trends that followed, and how they’ve held up six years later — is available here.

Reading this in 2025, the progression it describes — commodity → service → experience → image — turns out to have had another chapter we didn’t fully see coming.

The image economy got automated. The argument this piece makes is that brands became enablers of the customer’s image, and that the image itself became the product. That dynamic only intensified through the TikTok era — but generative AI has now made images infinitely producible at near-zero cost. The question of what makes an image meaningful, which was already hard in 2019, has become considerably harder.

The content farms had a short arc. Pop-up Instagrammable experiences peaked somewhere around 2018–2019, then ran headlong into the pandemic and never fully recovered. A few persisted (the Museum of Ice Cream has outposts in several cities), but the format largely ceded the cultural stage to TikTok-native content, where the stage is wherever you happen to be.

The personal brand thesis proved out — and created its own backlash. The observation that consumers had become publishers and publicists of their own stories was correct. What followed were the creator economy, the influencer industrial complex, and, eventually, a meaningful counter-movement toward authenticity and “de-influencing.” The tension between performed identity and genuine experience is as live now as it was when this was written.

The Starbucks analogy aged interestingly. Starbucks built its brand on being a third space. By the mid-2020s, operational changes and cultural drift had eroded much of that positioning — a reminder that brand associations built on experience are not permanent. The image economy is unforgiving to brands that lose the thread.

The underlying framework here — that each economic era adds a layer of value and complexity on top of the last — still holds. We’re just further along the stack than we were in 2019.