The rung sets the price, not the asset
Two orchards can sit within a stone’s throw of each other, sharing the same soil, the same trees, the same weather and the same decades of skill in the family, and still be an order of magnitude apart on what they charge. The gap isn’t the fruit. It’s the rung each one has decided to sell on. One is selling apples by weight. The other is selling the afternoon you spend among the trees, and nobody confuses the two when the invoice lands.
This isn’t a hunch dressed up as a theory. Pine and Gilmore articulated what they called the Experience Economy, a shift in developed economies away from a service orientation toward experiences becoming the predominant thing people pay for. In their framework, an experience is as different from a service as a service is from a good. They set it out in their 1999 book, The Experience Economy. The ladder runs in clear stages: commodities, then goods, then services, then experiences, and above all of them, transformations.
Here’s the part that should change how you think about your price list: each step up that ladder adds intangible value, the ambiance, the storytelling, the skill you hand across the bench, and that intangible value is what justifies charging a premium.
So the reframe is simple, and it’s the whole point of this piece. The rung you choose to sell on, not the quality of your asset, decides what you can charge. Most regional operators in this state are sitting on an experience the world would happily pay a premium for, and are still ringing it up like a commodity.
One orchard, four rungs
Let me walk a single South West orchard up the whole ladder, so you can find yourself somewhere on it.
Start at the bottom. You grow apples and you sell them by the bin to a packer. A commodity is the most basic, undifferentiated raw material, traded in bulk, with its value set by market supply and demand. Selling fresh produce straight off the farm sits right down here, at the commodity and goods level. Which means your price is set by someone else, entirely. A number arrives in the morning. You take it or you tip the fruit.
Now climb one rung. You bottle your own cider. That’s processing raw fruit into a value-added good, the textbook move from commodity to good. A good is a tangible, standardised product, with value added through processing, packaging and branding. You own a label and a margin now, and that’s real. But you’re still one bottle among many on a shelf, and the shopper’s eye slides across all of you at once, looking for the cheapest one that’ll do.
Climb again. You open the gate on weekends for pick-your-own, and you put a coffee machine and a toastie press in the old packing shed. That’s a service: the application of skill, labour or process for the customer’s benefit, sold on convenience and efficiency. A simple farm café offering prepared food and snacks sits squarely at this level. It feels like progress, because it is. But here’s the catch. Any neighbour with a gate and a coffee machine can copy it by Saturday, and the moment they do, you’re back to competing on opening hours and the price of a flat white.
Now climb to the top of the four. You run a curated cider tasting, paired with food, wrapped around a walk through the orchard. You add a hands-on session on top: pick the fruit, press it yourself, then bake a pie with what you picked. That’s an experience: a memorable event that engages the visitor personally and emotionally, co-created with them because they’re doing it, not watching it. Same trees. Same fruit. Same family. But now the offer combines the farm’s own narrative, its produce and the owner’s personality into something a competitor can’t simply lift, which is exactly what makes it a durable advantage rather than a copyable one. And people photograph it, and post it, and still talk about it a year later, because a resonant experience is inherently shareable and quietly does a chunk of your marketing for you.
The cellar door: bottles versus the afternoon
If you’re a hospitality operator rather than a grower, don’t tune out here. The same climb runs through a cellar door, and this is where I see the most money left on the table. Picture a composite of the ones I’ve walked into over the years, no single business, just the pattern. There’s a kitchen out the back that started life as a convenience: somewhere for the guests who were already staying to get dinner without driving half an hour in the dark. A service, in other words. Useful, replicable, priced by the plate.
The version that climbs takes that same kitchen and turns it into a reason to make the drive in the first place, not a consolation for having made it. The messaging shifts with it. It stops sounding like generic hospitality, the comfortable rooms and the warm welcome that every property in the region also claims, and it starts leading with the one specific thing worth travelling for. That’s the whole cellar-door lesson in a sentence.
Stop selling the bottle. Sell the long afternoon in the sun that makes someone want to take three bottles home so they can chase the feeling again in their kitchen in July.
How to tell which rung your experience is on
The ladder is the easy part. The hard part, and the bit the framework never hands you, is working out honestly which rung you’re already standing on. So here are three diagnostics you can apply to your own business before lunch.
First. If a competitor down the road could match your offer this month, you’re selling a service. Convenience and access are copyable, and copyable things get competed straight back down to cost.
Second. If your price is set by glancing at what the place down the road charges and landing a few dollars under, you’re selling a good. You’re on the shelf, and the shelf sets the price.
Third, and this is the one that matters most. If a visitor would tell someone about it, unprompted, a year later, you’re on the experience rung, whether you’ve priced yourself there or not.
There’s a plainer version of the same test. A generic meal in an ordinary room has many substitutes, so it’s forever subject to price competition, while a unique dinner hosted by the farmer, told through the land and the produce, has few direct substitutes at all. And this is why the climb pays. The higher an offering sits on the ladder, the less price-sensitive customers tend to be, because what they’re weighing shifts from a tangible cost to an intangible benefit.
Run the three tests honestly and most operators find the uncomfortable answer: they’ve built something close to an experience and they’re charging for a service. The asset is already up the ladder. The pricing is still at the bottom.
Pick the rung above you, and stage it
So what do you actually do with all this, sitting at the kitchen table deciding where the business goes next? You don’t rebrand. You don’t go and buy a bigger ad budget to shout your service offer louder, because more reach into a commodity offer just sells the commodity faster. You pick the one rung directly above where you honestly sit, and you stage it.
Staging has a real meaning here. It’s consciously designing every element of the visitor’s encounter, building a theme, the setting and the performance deliberately around your core product, rather than leaving the experience to happen by accident. And you don’t have to conquer every rung to win. An operator can position beautifully by being excellent at one or two levels, or by offering a small portfolio that spans several, so this is a choice about focus, not a forced march to the top.
This is a decision about direction, not a task for Monday morning. It’s you looking at the asset you already own and deciding, out loud, to sell it one rung higher than you have been. It cuts both ways across the operators I work with. Some are producers with the land, the story and the skill, but no visitor offering built yet, sitting on latent opportunity they haven’t turned into a product. Others already stage something genuine and simply price it like a service. Either way the move is the same, and the fit is the same: a visitable, experiential product, the wine, the truffle, the cheese, the berries, not a bin of anonymous commodity headed for a packer.
So here’s the decision to make before the next season, not the next campaign. Don’t compete on price. Climb the value ladder. Pick the rung above the one you’re on, and stage it deliberately. Not a rebrand, not a bigger ad spend, one rung, built on purpose. Sell the afternoon, not the apples.
