Consumers no longer buy products and services. Instead, they buy experiences.This is how the story told by the protagonists of the experience economy goes. However, despite the importance ascribed to consumers as experience-seekers, we still need to define what consumer experience is.

In 1998, Pine and Gilmore welcomed us to the experience economy and ever since, experience has occupied a prominent position. Thus, although the notion of experience is, by no means, `new', in recent years it has had a profound impact. The impact that the notion of experience has on consumer life is unquestionable. Hence, as consumers become more and more knowledgeable on psychological and sociological issues, their understanding of their own motivations underlying consumer behavior (including their search for new experiences), increases. Thus, the notion of the experience economy does not exclusively mean that marketers are going to further lengths in order to offer consumers new experiences. Instead, it also suggests that consumers become increasingly professional as they become more aware of the exact kind of experiences that they seek when they buy products and services.

The concept of experience still needs to be clearly defined. Although more than 20 years have passed since Holbrook and Hirschman discussed experiences as `fantasies, feelings, and fun', we do not seem to be close to offering a further refinement of this definition. Due to the lack of a more operational and clear-cut definition of the concept of experience, one might argue that we are in a situation where the notion of experience, most of all, resembles the situation experienced by a person who tries to define exactly what a `Heffalump' is. A Heffalump is an animal that was introduced by Milne in one of his stories about the adventures of Winnie the Pooh.

Obviously, there are (at least) two reasons why attempts to capture and henceforth, define the Heffalump were not successful. First, it might be that the Heffalump simply doesn't exist. However, an alternate explanation might be that he is, in fact, a real, large, and important animal; albeit an animal that cannot be captured by means of the tracking devices employed. Drawing on the Heffalump example, much the same problem arises in relation to our attempts to define experience. However, when it comes to experiences, most scholars would probably argue that experiences are simply so important that it makes little sense to dispute their existence.

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