Sundance 608 Cinema is an example of how a wise business works to attract people

Experience is business' new competitive frontier.

With today's products and services increasingly easy to duplicate, customer experience determines who wins and loses customers.

The new Sundance 608 Cinema, located in the recently remodeled Hilldale Shopping Center, offers multiple strategic insights into how to win at experience.

First, reinvent your offering to create a distinct experience that distinguishes you beyond what your core product can provide alone. Wrap lots of complementary products and services around the core offering, as they serve as props in a customized experience. By providing customers the freedom to create his or her own best experience, you become best in their minds.

At Sundance 608, these props include an inviting coffee-snack bar with numerous options for sitting, including oversized leather chairs in a room surrounded by art. The setting is conducive for conversation or reading a great magazine or book on a cold wintry day.

The second floor offers a relaxed bistro and cocktail lounge, along with stairs to a rooftop bar. The ambiance is "urban chic meets Madison warmth," welcoming to singles, couples and groups alike.

All these settings will enhance pre- and post-movie conversations. Wireless Internet will attract nontheater guests as well.

Second, focus on a specific target market. The same cinema won't win with sophisticated adult film lovers and teenage boys on Friday night.

Sundance, in fact, is segmenting the adult market finely - focusing on those who love the smaller independent films that rarely make it to Madison. Judging by the growing success of the Wisconsin Film Festival, this market is large and, with Sundance, likely to increase even more.

Third, make sure your imagery and offering are consistent. In trying to create a special movie experience, Sundance even takes care of eliminating the product ads shown before movies in traditional theaters. Paying money to be coerced into watching advertising is not the start of a great experience.

At Sundance, you'll instead walk past a long wall of sculpture that invites quiet contemplation and hopefully precludes the loud conversations in typical movie theaters before and sometimes after the feature film starts.

After doing so much right, there is one area where Sundance falls short in consistency in imagery. Sundance 608 was designed with local materials and Midwest styling with the aim of creating a local business feeling. If this is true, why not offer Ancora or Steep and Brew Coffee, whose locally roasted beans are sure to be fresher than the import from California?

The Sundance 608 gift shop has the same fault. Incongruently filled with boring Sundance-branded merchandise, the visitor is reminded Sundance is anything but a local business.

Wendy Cooper, who relocated her Madison gallery to Chicago years ago, could create a wonderful Wisconsin artist gallery in this space.

It would be easy to look at experience as another flavor-of-the-day business trend or as a repackaging of an age-old customer satisfaction concept that the travel and restaurant industries have wrestled with for centuries. Viewing experience this way would be dangerous. In a world where quality, customer satisfaction and value are taken-for-granted requirements to even be considered, a better experience is a welcomed and essential differentiator.

What is the experience aspect of your business? How can you make your customer or client experience more memorable, valuable and whatever other words spell "desirable" in your industry?

Kay Plantes is a Madison economist, strategy consultant and executive educator.