Marketing conference speakers to discuss customer experience, creative vision.

• Position: MARKETING edge

Are banks in the business of providing financial services? Actually, banks today are in the business of "staging engaging experiences that generate economic value for their customers." And if your bank doesn't understand that, it is probably not reaching its full profit potential.

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This year's ABA Marketing Conference has signed up two keynote speakers who will discuss the importance to banks of customer experience and creative thought.

The first, Joseph Pine, is the co-author of the best-selling book, "Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want," and is the co-founder of the business consulting company, Strategic Horizons LLP, Aurora, Ohio.

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The second, Erik Wahl, talks about "The Art of Vision." He is an artist and the co-founder of the business consulting company, The Wahl Group Inc., San Diego.

The conference will be held September 14-16 at the Colorado Convention Center, Denver.

Pine's thesis is that as businesses create more finely calibrated customer experiences, the customers start making decisions based on how real they perceive various offerings to be. As a result, Pine says, enterprises must become adept at rendering authenticity. "This new challenge can be defined best as the management of the customer perception of authenticity," he says.

A former IBM employee, Pine was one of the first observers to identify the trend toward mass customization in his 1992 book, "Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition." In 1996, he and Jim Gilmore founded their company, Strategic Horizons LLP, whose goal is "to discover what was going on in the business world, make sense of it, and then develop frameworks so that companies could respond intelligently to the fundamental changes happening in the competitive environment."

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