MeetBri Media Analysis · Experiential Economy · May 2026
Four flat years. Then mindshare started climbing — in seven industries at once.
The category, briefly
The experiential economy is the part of the market where the staged moment is the product — not the goods you take home, not the service rendered, but the experience itself. Live Nation, the Sphere, Royal Caribbean, Disney Parks, Meow Wolf, immersive theater, festivals, in-person learning, destination travel.
It also includes the events ecosystem that runs through every other industry: corporate gatherings, weddings, conferences, retreats, milestone celebrations, brand activations. The room you pay to be in, on a date that won’t repeat.
Pine & Gilmore named it in 1998: commodities → goods → services → experiences, each rung more memorable, more differentiated, and harder to replicate than the last.
It overlaps with customer experience but is evolving past it. CX traditionally polishes an existing product. What this analysis tracks is executives in adjacent industries adopting that same vocabulary — and starting to treat experience as part of the value proposition itself, not polish on top of it.
2020 – April 2026 · The arc
Across the corpus, executives mention the experiential economy — customer experience, immersive, sensory, memorable, personalized — in a steady share of conversations through 2023. Then mindshare started climbing.
Mindshare as a share of all executive interviews.
| Year | Mindshare |
|---|---|
| 2020 | 4.8% |
| 2021 | 4.8% |
| 2022 | 4.5% |
| 2023 | 4.6% |
| 2024 | 5.0% |
| 2025 | 5.5% |
| Apr ‘26 | 5.9% |
April 2026 · The acceleration
Within 2026 alone, the monthly mindshare rate has climbed every month. April hit 5.9% — higher than any full year since 2020.
Where the mindshare is growing
The aggregate climb isn’t a single sector running away with it. Mindshare is rising broadly — from naturally experience-driven categories like Retail and Logistics into Marketing, Media, Government, and Education.
Tech / SaaS is the exception — CX has been baseline language there for years. The rise is happening everywhere else.
The pattern
The sectors where experience is core — Food & Hospitality, E-Commerce, Supply Chain — have been talking about it for years.
The sectors where it wasn’t are starting to.
Government 5×’d. Marketing Agencies and Training & Education nearly tripled. Healthcare Services and Media & Entertainment more than doubled.
Many of these adjacent sectors are quietly in the events economy — Marketing Agencies producing brand activations, Logistics handling event AV and staging, Higher Education running alumni weekends, Government driving destination tourism. They didn’t think of themselves as experiential operators. Now they’re talking like ones.
When the language spreads to the adjacent rooms, the trend is real.
What’s actually behind the lift
The mindshare growth isn’t a single trend. It’s three distinct conversations that arrived together — and reinforce each other on the operator side.
Live events, festivals, hospitality, travel, in-person learning — the categories where the product is the experience are winning wallet share. Goods growth is flat; experience-led categories are setting revenue records. Operators in those rooms are getting more boardroom airtime because the growth is real.
After a decade of screens — and a pandemic that pushed everything remote — in-person became scarce, and scarce became valuable. The Sphere selling out U2 and Eagles residencies, Royal Caribbean and Disney Parks posting record revenues, Meow Wolf opening a fourth city, immersive theater scaling. The transcripts call it “atmosphere,” “sensory,” “being there.” The category has a shape now.
What used to be niche — fandoms, paid communities, IRL gatherings, creator-led events — is now a primary revenue model. Live Nation putting up record concert revenue, festival circuits expanding, paid creator communities and conferences scaling. Marketing agencies, Higher Education, even Government tourism are running the same playbook: the gathering is the offer.
The interesting moment isn’t that experiences are valuable — Pine & Gilmore named the category in 1998 in a must-read HBR article. It’s that the executives outside the obvious sectors are now treating experiential as a strategy, not a marketing tactic.
What this is, and isn’t
Mindshare is counted as the share of executive interviews per year (and per industry per era) that surface the experiential vocabulary cluster: customer experience, buyer experience, experiential, experience economy, immersive, personalized experience.
The cluster intentionally includes “customer experience” alongside the more obviously experiential terms. In the industries we’re tracking, the rise of CX language is the signal — it’s how executives in non-experiential sectors first start framing the shift toward experience as part of the value proposition.
The corpus-wide year-over-year arc and the eight industry comparisons (seven risers plus Tech / SaaS as the flat comparison) each rest on hundreds to thousands of interviews. April 2026 is the latest fully-published month; May figures firm up as more episodes drop.
The breadth is the strongest finding. Seven different industries moving in the same direction, in the same window, is harder to explain as noise than any single sector’s rise.
MeetBri will hear it first.
Monthly mindshare reports tracking which themes are climbing, which industries are picking them up, and what executives are saying — from the conversation itself.
The paper is free either way.
MeetBri turns long-form executive interviews into fresh behavioral intelligence for sales, marketing, founder, and product-marketing teams. 96,000+ buyer profiles across 54 industries and 48 job functions, refreshed monthly from real conversations — not inferred from static personas.
Data as of May 3, 2026. Methodology and source counts available on request. Nothing in this page is financial or investment advice.