“I’ll pay for that experience.”

A stand-out stat from our Best Experience Brands study released last week is the number of consumers (78%) who say they’d pay more for a product or service if they knew they’d have a unique experience with that brand.

Think about it: in the midst of what people keep telling us is the worst recession in forever, 78% of consumers would pay more for a better experience. It doesn’t make sense.

And yet it makes total sense. Imagine consumers adrift in a sea of sameness, struggling to distinguish among competing products and discern relevant content from the thousands of media messages they’re exposed to on a daily basis. The promise of a unique experience with a brand immediately shifts the dynamic—from push to pull, from brand to user, from talking about providing value to actually doing so. Of course consumers are willing to pay more for that!