Nordicum - Real Estate Annual Finland 2016 | Page 11

Photo: Sini Pennanen

must find ways to mobilise people in new
ways. Joe Pine believes that if there is any
magic left in shopping malls, at the core of
it must be the experience.
“The key battle in this shift into the
Experience Economy is the battle for time,
the currency of experiences. Goods and services are being commoditised everywhere
because consumers want to buy them at the
lowest possible price and greatest possible
convenience – which in both cases increasingly means online – so they can save their
hard-earned money and time on the experiences that they enjoy.”
According to Pine, the only reason
to go to a mall today is for the experience,
whether that is as minor as seeing, touching,
and using goods before the purchase, as traditional as people-watching, or as engaging
as the many thoughtfully designed experiences that fill the more pioneering shopping
centres today.

Experiencing Finland
A little known fact about Joe Pine is that he
has a very strong connection to Finland. For
one, his wife is half Finnish, hailing from
near the Swedish border up in Lapland. Sec-

ond, Pine has done a lot of work in the country over the past 15 years, including being at
the birth of the Lapland Experience Organization in Rovaniemi and working with such
companies as Finpro, Elisa, Tekes, Nokia,
and, in real estate, Kiinko.
“I love the place,” he grins. “It’s beautiful, and the people are warm even when the
climate is cold.”
In the experience department, Finland has not gone unnoticed either. Every
year Joe Pine and his partner Jim Gilmore
give out an Experience Stager of the Year
(EXPY) award to a company that stands
head and shoulders above its competitors –
and in 2014, the award went to Ilkka Länkinen, the Managing Director of SantaPark.
“First, he deserved it alone for the
wonderful Santa Claus experience that is
Joulukka, but when he and his wife Katja
took over SantaPark a few years ago, they
really turned around what was a fairly dead
experience into a lively one, with wonderful workers and a great theme of ‘Christmas Every Day.’”
As SantaPark was honoured, this
marked only the second time the award went
out to a European company (after LEGO
in 2002).

Travelling Man
And that’s not to say that Pine hasn’t been
travelling outside the US very much – in
fact, just about the opposite is true. In 2014,
he travelled over 170,000 miles, and 2015
was not that far behind, including two visits
to Finland and hitting three new countries,
Malaysia, Thailand and Morocco, respectively. His unofficial motto for the road is
‘Have audience, will perform’.
Apparently, the only thing that makes
Pine frown on the road are four-hour dinners
which generally start at 7 or 8 pm – which
means that it’s normally around midnight
when you can check your e-mail and prepare for the next day.
But then there was that one time in
winter-time Lapland where the dinner
stretched to about eight hours – but you
won’t hear Mr. Pine complain about that.
Hosted by the Lapland Experience Organization up in Rovaniemi, the “super dinner”
started with a sleigh ride, ended in a sauna
– with no dull moment in sight.
“I loved every minute of it – and didn’t
even think about checking my e-mail.” O
Sami J. Anteroinen

Nordicum

9