There is the product-centred approach in which experiences are treated in the same way as products. The focus is on making, creating, staging and giving experiences and on what organizations have to do to make these experiences as compelling, involving and entertaining as possible for the customer. Theories within this approach are focused on the internal processes of the organization and the features that the experience has to have.

In the person-centred approach experience is seen as the effect on the customer of whatever happens to him. Within this approach the focus is on the management of hedonic effects. Other effects are often neglected and there is cause for serious doubt whether effects can in fact be managed.

The third approach is interaction-centred. Within this approach authors focus on the interaction between the individual and his environment, which to them is the experience. This interaction has long been considered to revolve around an exchange of benefits or utility and money, but attention is being paid to the fact that more than benefits and utilities is needed because of commoditization and the need for differentiation. However, the various values besides financial value that are invested by the individual are often not taken into account.

By reviewing literature on experience from various other disciplines (psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, etc), I have combined these three approaches to help clarify the often confusing discussions in which everything is being called an experience by providing a framework in which different types of experiences, different levels of effects and different values that are exchanged are taken into account. The reference model that results from this framework will be tested by making use of in-depth interviews with individuals to find out whether the relations between types of experiences, effects and invested values that I have found in literature, are in fact the relations that individuals themselves express.