Sand it was easy to understand what we feel and whythere would be more free places on therapists’ beds, at yoga courses and at sessions with coaches, astrologers and gurus. If we followed the advice of Plato, who invites us to favor rationality, or Freud, the advocate of desiretoday we would not be in an existential short circuit that can be summarized in a formula: we look for emotions on the market of feelings, but often we are not able to produce them ourselvesrecognize them, give them as a gift to those around us.
A recent market analysis, presented by Altagammathe foundation that brings together luxury brands, has highlighted how customers no longer want just the object (the designer bag, the garment costing thousands of euros), but rather the experience. It is no coincidence that the top names of fashion and high jewelry have equipped themselves by creating “experiential” areas in their points of sale or in exclusive showrooms, with lounges, bars, even restaurants, offering champagne and dedicating time, attention and indulgence to those who came in looking for the iconic bag or jewel. The data emerging from the foundation’s 2024 study also shows that it is the sectors capable of offering experiences that are rewarded: tourism and catering.
Hungry for emotions and experiences
We are therefore on the hunt for emotions, regardless of age or gendervery young people, adults, men and women? Davide Bennato, sociologist of digital media, professor at the University of Catania, gets straight to the point: «Emotions reinforce our identity. “I am this, because I feel this”. But everyone lives in their own bubble, so much so that the sense of belonging today is found almost only in shared feelings. “There are many of us who feel this way.” And that’s not a good thing.
With the viewer you immerse yourself in a virtual dimension, even in the absence of an artist’s work. (Getty Images)
This happens because there is an ongoing fragmentation of society: there is no longer a sense of the collective, the family has crumbled either due to separations or due to children living elsewhere. And there is a further element: social networks are based on the relationship of a single individual with another single individual, while it is in the dimension of action that emotions are found.”
Get out of your comfort zone
Today emotion, empathy, happiness and the many variations of feeling are rare commodities. Escape rooms, where you feel the fear of not being able to get out of a closed room, are no longer enough, nor are extreme sports such as bungee jumping, nor hardcore sites or terrifying films. Even in this third millennium dominated by technology, it seems that the anthropological hunger for live emotions persists, the important thing is to get out of our comfort zone.
We need physicality, human contact, someone who provokes an emotional reaction. And the market is gearing up to satisfy demand, as demonstrated by experiential art, the so-called immersive cinema, tailor-made tourism with gourmet itineraries and exclusive destinations, and proposals for self-awareness.
Some examples: the Van Gogh experience and Klimt experience exhibitions sold out, where the artists’ canvases were the major absentees, replaced by gigantic installations and augmented reality; the effect of seeing the paintings on mega videos, with music and interaction, was enough.
Cinema: a few years ago, Alejandro González Iñárrituan Oscar-winning Mexican director, made an experiential film with augmented reality, Carne y arena, also hosted in Milan at the Prada Foundation; barefoot, in very small groups, we entered a space strewn with sand as if we were on the border between the United States and Mexico. It was there that the odyssey of the immigrants took place, between police, attacks and growling dogs. Goosebumps, fear and of course sold out. And after Iñárritu other experiential films have arrived, because the cinema of the future promises to be immersive, interactive, multisensorial and algorithmic. In a word: engaging.
And then there is the clear fact that the most viewed series are those that stimulate fear or desire, thrillers and sex stories. It may be a coincidence, but a few weeks ago Luminous Insults was released. Notebook to (badly) manage your emotions (Cairo publisher), a game book for children and adults with drawings, quizzes and various silly books, whose chapters are self-awareness, self-management, self-realization.
Elisa Ferrari, who has been in the tourism sector for 35 years, created a site with an unequivocal name in 2020, Emotional Travel. She combined her travel coaching and communicator experience with the result of having continuous requests, especially from women. It has a formula: «I use travel as a tool to achieve an intimate goal, it could be self-esteem, self-awareness, overcoming the sense of abandonment. Before the trip it is possible to undertake a personal growth journey, and on the return, some sessions with very specific methods”. It specializes in Oman, India and the Camino de Santiago and the expected groups do not exceed 15 units.
Everything is experiential
Paolo Conca has been moving on a terrain of self-awareness for years, with decades of experience in communication, coaching and work psychology, without snubbing the astrological aspect. In September he created a YouTube channel calling it Human Quotient, mixing reflections, stimuli, irony, questions. In a few weeks, by word of mouth, he had thousands of views and his short film on softness, for example, has the wind in his sails. He says: «People know little or nothing about their emotions. The human quotient is the personal ability to implement rational or affective behaviors, but what is often missing is the awareness of what I feel, of my human state. There is a cold solitude, everyone with their own devices. We are overwhelmed by digital.”
In 2017 Tiffany Paul Smith counted 156 emotions and gave an account of them in a book that is the classic on the subject, Atlas of Human Emotions (Utet). Umberto Galimberti, a much-loved psychoanalyst, has sold thousands of copies of his The Book of Emotions (Feltrinelli), underlining, among other things, how the constant search for visibility with social media has made our emotions commodities. Which appeal to those who have to sell products, subscriptions, trips, restaurants. With two tangible consequences: the use and abuse of the term “experiential” and the explosion of so-called experiential marketing.
Monetized emotions
On what the term means, Stefano Bartezzaghi, a semiologist, knows how to respond: «The adjective experiential entered the Italian lexicon in 1983. It seems to me that this qualifies a type of commercial offer that goes beyond the material product and offers itself to the sensoriality and sensitivity of people as an interior enrichment. There are restaurants where you certainly eat and drink, but first and foremost you live an experience: also called a “journey”. Good old consumerism ennobles itself by offering to take us from point A to point B. Which is also worthy, but my impression is that the object of consumption is the experience itself, destined to have an ephemeral duration and not truly remain in the memory, as experience does when it is significant.”
The creative director and advertising writer Paolo Iabichino is even more severe in this regard: «I have been hearing about experiential marketing for 20 years, to the extent that we try to circumvent the consumer through an offer that enriches the product. And the platforms have taken possession of this method in a rapacious way, they have monetized emotions. While before marketing was the creation of a need, now I go to procure emotion… “That thing makes me cry, it makes me desire, it makes me angry.” It is nothing more than a manipulative way. And since we can’t get emotions anywhere else, in real life, we look for them online. It’s as if we were anesthetized. It’s emotional pornography. We need to reclaim uncomfortable emotions. And do it soon before it’s too late.”
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