--- title: The experience economy is booming. So why is growth getting harder? date: 2026-09-23T12:00:00+01:00 author: Alice Green canonical_url: "https://hellomustard.com/news/growth-made-predictable" section: News --- [Work ](https://hellomustard.com/case-studies) [Services ](https://hellomustard.com/services) [About ](https://hellomustard.com/who-we-are) [Press ](https://hellomustard.com/press) [Latest ](https://hellomustard.com/news) [Events ](https://hellomustard.com/events-webinars) [Contact us](https://hellomustard.com/contact) # The experience economy is booming. So why is growth getting harder? *Written by Sian Bennett, Managing Director, mustard, September 2026* ![AO Arena bowl](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/AO-Arena-bowl.jpeg?w=1600&h=900&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1790155839&s=07ed48d24427d9a164cc678b767b00cb) Thoughts Strategy Growth The experience economy is booming. So why is growth getting harder? ## We're unpacking all of this in a webinar Tuesday 29th September 12-1pm BST, sign-up to register Date 23rd Sept 2026 read time 5 minutes Author Sian Bennett Tags Thoughts Strategy Growth [Get in touch](https://hellomustard.com/contact)[About us](https://hellomustard.com/who-we-are) ## The perishable problem The experience economy is booming. This year alone we’ve seen festival clients achieve sell-outs in record time, with another selling to record capacities. One hospitality venue broke all revenue records in a single quarter. Sports experiences are driving 54% uplifts in tickets year-on-year. Plenty are thriving, but the gap between the top of the market and everyone else is widening as the cost of running and marketing an experience rises faster than most events can afford. The experience economy is an industry where the majority of customers don’t return; meaning novelty is the sell, and also the ceiling. However, as demand is hitting record highs, so is the cost of acquisition. This poses an even bigger challenge when converting new, first-time bookers every year has never been more convoluted and expensive. Because experience brands sell perishable inventory, unpredictability is not just an inconvenience but an unrecoverable loss. An unsold ticket on the night of a show has no residual value to keep. A stadium at 60% capacity cannot recover that revenue. A restaurant half empty is losing money every hour. The gap between a predictive, data-led approach and a reactive, spend-when-scared approach is a difference worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not more. This doesn’t just become a marketing problem; it’s a cash flow and commercial confidence problem because if you cannot predict demand, you cannot commit to the site fee, the artist deposit, or the bar inventory. Far too many events leave hundreds of thousands of pounds on the table, or at a loss, with no system for predicting and scaling bookings. ## Predictable revenue has to be the goal Festivals, sport, hospitality and tours are some of the most complex products in the world to plan, price and deliver, which is what makes tracking and decision-making feel like the Wild West. “Nobody can predict the future, but you can make it feel a lot more predictable than most events currently do, and there are psychological and commercial disciplines that take the guesswork out of bookings.” ![DSCF6666](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/DSCF6666.jpg?w=1600&h=2133&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5435&fp-y=0.2687&dm=1789658835&s=f6cca43463610b4a3f7384f7be69a1e0) Sian Bennett Managing Director Predictable revenue matters not just for growth, but for the commercial confidence to run the event in the first place. Nobody can predict the future, but you can make it feel a lot more predictable than most events currently do, and there are psychological and commercial disciplines that take the guesswork out of bookings. I’m not here to claim that predictable growth means a guaranteed sell-out, because no system (or agency) in the world can promise that. It’s not a dashboard, and it isn’t a set of tactics that worked last year. Predictable growth is knowing which levers move which numbers, by how much, at what cost, and how early you would see it in the data. ## In practice, it means answering 2 questions before going on sale rather than after it. 1. Where will our bookings come from, and how can we scale based on those numbers? 2. Who are those bookers, what makes them say yes, and can we repeat that? Answer those, and you are in control of your campaign. Leave them open, and you are reacting to it. That difference is worth hundreds of thousands of pounds to an event, in either direction... ## So, how do you make growth predictable? ### Commercial discipline beats guesswork We begin all of our strategy sessions with the guiding principle that selling tickets and driving bookings is a numbers game, and a race against time. You have a fixed amount of inventory to fill and a fixed number of days to fill it before it perishes. As event operators ourselves, we have first-hand experience of this financial and emotional pressure. This is why we lead with a practice called *Experience Economics™*. The goal of *Experience Economics™* is to reduce the guesswork and focus your efforts in the right places. And if we’re being honest, it’s also to combat sleepless nights, and tetchy meetings after refreshing the ticket count. And we’ve all been there and got the t-shirt for those! As event operators, we know that budgets are tight, teams are stretched, and time is never on your side. So we reverse-engineer your data to predict where it needs to land: targets, margins, benchmarks, conversion rates, budgets, sales mix, channel mix, sales curves, scenario models. Using this data as your north star means you can start with total clarity on where your marketing strategy needs to focus. Events simply can’t afford to waste time on random tactics and nice-to-have ideas. To do any of that, you first have to reconcile your numbers, track the right metrics, and document where your sales actually come from. We know forecasts and benchmarks are never guaranteed, but they provide the much-needed focus and clarity on where and when you need to course correct, and more importantly, clarity on where to double down and scale. This becomes critical in an industry where your costs are already sunk, and inventory is perishable. ![Bongos 5](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/bongos-5.webp?w=1600&h=2133&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1790158883&s=ee542a7070513c0c48ac7f52b8c0cb9f) ![Forbidden forest 7](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/forbidden-forest-7.jpg?w=1600&h=2133&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1786027622&s=966e72f40a5166d02b4658b2b0192d61) We worked with a new attraction to bring it to market, their initial ticket target was 40,000. By identifying the right metrics to scale and building a system to push the budget to its maximum, profitable potential, we helped them more than double their initial target and hit 85,000 ticket sales in year one. The change in trajectory for this event was transformational in terms of the confidence to scale it up in year two, and I firmly believe this couldn’t have happened without the daily decision-making that our *Experience Economics™* approach unlocked. Our CEO, Rob Masterson, has written a brilliant article on this, exploring how events should be marketing-led, not marketing-fed (coming soon!). Whilst this may sound like it sucks all of the fun out of marketing, the majority of events and experiences cannot afford to take a bet on shiny new ideas and long-term brand building if you don’t understand the foundations behind the numbers you need to hit. This practice actually creates more time (and sanity) for the fun stuff in the long run. I believe tracking this data is less common in the experience economy for several reasons. Acquisition models used across in traditional ecommerce doesn't transfer, where products like fashion, skin care and supplements can forecast demand and scale spend off Customer Acquisition Costs and Lifetime Value because the model assumes repetition. You're selling roughly the same thing to the same person again. A festival lineup changes every year. A fixture list changes every season. A dining experience is not the same experience twice. The booker is buying a new version of it that won't exist again after this. That breaks the core assumption most scalable acquisition and retention modelling is built on. The cost structure in experiences has also never demanded margin thinking. Most of the big costs – venue, artist, production – are sunk before a single booking lands, so the only question this industry has ever really had to answer is whether it broke even, not what its margin per booking actually was. True profit often isn't known until weeks after an event has finished. Nobody in the chain (promoter, venue, artist, ticketing platform) sees the whole picture, because nobody captures the whole economics. For a long time, none of this mattered for experiences, because scarcity and sell outs did the job margin discipline should have done for early proof of concept. These structural realities of the experience economy mean we need to work intentionally to lead with commercial discipline. That means understanding the true cost and margin of a ticket sale or an email lead (how many of you set your target CPA with a finger in the air, as long as it’s at least half the cost of the booking... be honest?) or knowing what share of bookings comes from paid, email, organic, partnerships and walk-up. It means conversion rates in real detail, by channel and by point in the sales cycle. And it means the unglamorous work of reconciliation, because your ticketing platform, your analytics and your ad accounts will all report a different number for the same weekend, and in most events businesses nobody has ever sat down and squared them off. The events that lead with this approach will save a lot of time and money by not guessing. ![Firehouse](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/firehouse.jpg?w=1600&h=900&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1786629441&s=23f95cd2f85e3abd1dcf31612b1b3e3c) ## The behavioural science of a booker is too complex to be a hunch Leaving your front door to attend an event is a deeply tribal decision. The rate of change in technology, and subsequently social landscapes, is unprecedented and has intensely fragmented the social cues that decide whether someone shows up. Trends now last days, not years, and there are more micro-communities and niche subsets than this industry has ever had to read at once, making those cues far harder to predict. Converting a booking is one of the toughest behavioural science problems there is, because it compounds 3 frictions that no other form of commerce faces at once. A group has to commit, not just one booker. The cost never stops at the booking: the bill stacks up with outfits, travel, and time off. And to top it off, the whole experience is dictated by the strangers you end up sharing a space with. That is why we focus on leading with Booker Intelligence, using systems, data and feedback loops that decode the social cues, tribal mechanics, urgency, friction, group decision dynamics, and emotional triggers that drive a booking. A dashboard alone may tell you what worked, but it has never sold a ticket. Triggers are specific, booking windows vary enormously by sector, and the psychology of committing to a festival ticket is nothing like committing to a competitive socialising night or a Christmas experience. Novelty compounds the need for this too. We see an average of 10-30% return rate for most experiences, which shows how much events underestimate the task ahead of them every year when it comes to finding new bookers from scratch. When 4 out of 5 of your attendees have never booked with you before, you are solving the same cold decision from scratch, every cycle, against cues that have moved since the last time you got it right. New fan acquisition is the most sustainable growth lever there is, and audience churn makes it a necessity rather than a choice. But targeting new bookers was never the hard part, every experience does that. The hard part is building a strategy to systematically find new bookers year on year. And holding this accountable with targets, benchmarking, testing, feedback loops, and a real way of measuring the uplift new audiences deliver year on year. Without that system, you are shooting in the wind. ![AO](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/AO.webp?w=1600&h=900&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1790160817&s=86b959c859382ce9948fd524f05f85e7) ## Why this matters Events sell out for all sorts of reasons. Right place, right programme, right time. The question is not whether you sold out last year. It is whether you could explain why in enough detail to do it again on purpose. We see the same challenges time and time again. **Runaway trains.** We work with a touring experience that started off in one city and now operates at national scale. Their success often outpaces its ability to explain itself. Brilliant to be part of, but genuinely difficult to scale, or focus efforts when demand turns. We helped unlocked an additional £100,000 in revenue for one touring brand by designing a multi-channel system across paid, organic, and email helping to predict how to drive bookings from new audiences and existing fans, delivering a 42% improvement in ROAS. **Cold starts.** Launching something new when entry to the market has never been more expensive, and needing to prove demand exists before the commercial confidence to proceed does. We recently brought a new international festival to market from a cold start, and were able to drive over 70% bookings on launch by leading with commercial discipline and booker intelligence before a ticket even went on sale. This gave the commercial confidence for the festival to go ahead, it sold out in year one, and it’s now entering it’s third year. **Crossroads.** Many established experiences have years of proven sales and growth, yet the market and competition changes and they need to recover their market share. We work with a sports team experienceing early growth but demand began to flatten, and they needed to prove there is enough new audience out there to fill a stadium. By systemising new fan strategies, we’ve helped drive up to 143% uplifts in year-on-year matchday sales. None of these are marketing briefs alone. They are commercial decisions with marketing consequences, and that’s why we describe ourselves as a growth partner rather than a marketing agency because we’re invested in the commercial outcome, not just marketing activity. We are operators ourselves, so we understand the stakes are too high to leave thousands of groups of people planning, agreeing, booking, dressing up and leaving the house to chance. We’d never claim you cannot succeed without these disciplines, plenty do, but the reality is it’s a rare and lucky few. And without it, every year is guesswork. So, 2 questions for your next marketing meeting… 1. Do you understand who your audiences are and exactly why they book a ticket? 2. And could you explain where last year’s bookings came from, in enough detail to do it again deliberately? If the answer to either takes weeks, if not months, to solve, then it’s no longer a marketing gap but a commercial risk. ![MUSTARD HEADSHOTS31756](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/MUSTARD_HEADSHOTS31756.jpg?w=1600&h=2133&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.4912&fp-y=0.2406&dm=1790161544&s=60aa6bbba023f8cdacff46d00f5383f6) Written by ## Sian Bennett ## Managing Director, mustard you might also like [more news & thoughts](https://hellomustard.com/news) [![AO Arena bowl](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/AO-Arena-bowl.jpeg?w=1600&h=900&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1790155839&s=07ed48d24427d9a164cc678b767b00cb) Thoughts Strategy Growth The experience economy is booming. 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