Four flat years, then mindshare started climbing — in seven industries at once. The experiential economy is the part of the market where the staged moment is the product, and executives outside the obvious sectors are starting to talk like operators in it.
Four flat years, then a stair-step up
Across the corpus, executives mention experiential themes — customer experience, immersive, sensory, memorable, personalized — in a steady share of conversations through 2023. Then mindshare started climbing.
Share of all executive interviews mentioning experiential-economy themes.
Seven industries lifted at once
The aggregate climb isn’t a single sector running away with it. Mindshare is rising broadly, from 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, so its share is flat. The rise is happening everywhere else. When the language spreads to the adjacent rooms, the trend is real.
What’s driving the lift
Three distinct conversations arrived together. Spend moved from things to moments — live events, festivals, hospitality, and travel are winning wallet share. Presence became the premium good — after a decade of screens, in-person became scarce, and scarce became valuable. And fan and community economies went mainstream — paid communities, creator-led events, and IRL gatherings are now a primary revenue model.
Methodology
Mindshare is 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 breadth is the strongest finding — seven industries moving in the same direction, in the same window, is harder to explain as noise than any single sector’s rise.
Experiential-economy mindshare hit a record 5.9% of executive interviews in April 2026, rising across seven industries at once.