The Real Product Is Memory

In outdoor hospitality, parks and recreation, and destination development, the word experience is appearing quite often. We talk about designing experiences, elevating experiences, curating experiences, investing in experiences. And to be fair, something real sits underneath that instinct. We all know that places live or die not only by what they have, but by how people feel when they are there.

But the part that matters most is not the moment itself.

It is what the moment becomes after it is over.

Tourism researchers have spent the better part of two decades studying this. Kim, Ritchie, and McCormick (2012) developed the first rigorous scale for measuring what they called memorable tourism experiences, identifying the specific destination attributes that determine whether a visit leaves a lasting mark or fades within a week. Their finding was clear: the factors that make a tourism experience memorable are not the same factors that make it satisfying in the moment. Novelty, local culture, social interaction, involvement, knowledge, and meaningfulness all play a role in whether a visit encodes into long-term memory. But the critical insight is that satisfaction and memorability are different constructs. A visitor can be perfectly satisfied and forget the place entirely.

That distinction matters for anyone trying to build a place people return to.

Because experience is the event. Memory is what remains. And what remains is what shapes behavior. When is the last time you wanted to repeat something when it is associated with a bad memory?

The ladder no one talks about

There is a progression that connects a physical place to the economic outcomes communities and developers actually care about. It looks like this:

Amenity gets attention. It is what we see and what gets built. A trail, a city park, a pool and lounge, a spa courtyard. This is the thing you can point at, the line item in a capital budget. Amenities are necessary. They are the entry point. But they are not the product.

Experience shapes the visit. The weather was perfect as the sun set. The meal was perfect. The view one of a kind. And after the meal a wine and whiskey pairing under the dark night sky. This is just one example of the type of end-to-end destination planners optimize for, and it is important. But it happens in real time and then it is over. An what happens before and after this experience matters.

Memory determines what sticks. Not everything from a visit survives when we return home. What gets stored is selective, reconstructed, and disproportionately shaped by moments of peak emotion and by whatever happened at the end. Kim, Woo, and Uysal (2018) demonstrated that the tourism experiences most likely to persist in memory are those that generate a sense of attachment to the place itself. The visit does not just happen at a location. It bonds to a location.

Associations organize meaning. Once a memory forms, it does not sit alone. It connects to other memories, other ideas, other feelings about the kind of person who goes to a place like that. A 2026 Harvard Business Review study by Vriens and colleagues found that spontaneous associations, the unprompted thoughts people carry about a brand, predicted future spending behavior more reliably than traditional satisfaction measures. Each additional positive association correlated with an 18% increase in spending. Each negative association correlated with a 12% decrease. The study measured pharmacy customers, not trail riders, downtown visitors, or resort guests. But the mechanism transfers. What people spontaneously think about your place predicts what they will do next. The perfect dinner, the stars in the dark sky, fade away if the return to their room is not perfect as well. If the room doesn’t match the dinner experience we are creating the wrong associations. Or if the journey back to their room was less than ideal it impacts the associations, the memory, and their impression of the experience.

Identity makes it personally relevant. The deepest associations are not just positive. They are self-referential. This is the kind of place someone like me goes. This reflects who I am. This is where I belong. Wang and colleagues (2022) conducted a meta-analysis of place attachment research and found a consistent link between how strongly visitors attach their identity to a destination and how likely they are to return, recommend, and spend. The connection is not abstract. It is behavioral. How many times have you caught yourself window shopping for homes on a vacation, and returning to memories you created from this special place?

Behavior is what markets and operators actually measure. Return visits. Length of stay. Per-visit spending. Word of mouth. Willingness to pay a premium. These are the outcomes that show up in lodging tax receipts and restaurant revenue and housing demand. Zhang and colleagues (2014) synthesized 66 independent studies and found that destination image, the composite mental picture visitors hold of a place, significantly predicts both loyalty and future behavioral intention. A follow-up meta-analysis by Zhang, Xu, Leung, and Cai (2021) confirmed the relationship across 86 studies.

If you want to change spending behavior, you have to change what sticks.

What you remember is not what happened

Memory is not a recording. It is a reconstruction.

When people think back on a place they have visited, they are not replaying it as it happened. They are reactivating fragments. A feeling at arrival. A moment on a trail. A conversation over lunch. A point of friction they did not expect. These fragments reassemble into something that feels like a complete memory but is actually a curated highlight reel shaped by salience, emotion, and repetition.

The memorable tourism experience research confirms this. Kim, Ritchie, and McCormick (2012) found that experiences scoring high on novelty, emotional involvement, and local cultural engagement were far more likely to be retained and recalled. Experiences that were pleasant but routine, a fine meal, adequate lodging, a clean restroom, tended to fade. The things that stick are the things that surprised, moved, or connected.

This has a practical consequence that most destination planners overlook. Friction matters.

Imagine a rider who drives two and a half hours to a trail system. The trails are excellent. The flow is world-class. But the signage on the way in was confusing. The only lunch option was a gas station sandwich. There was no place afterward that asked them to sit, linger, or feel like the town was glad they came. The ride was great. The memory is mixed. And the next time a friend asks where to go, the recommendation comes with a caveat.

That caveat is the friction encoding into the association layer. And the research suggests it carries disproportionate weight. Negative associations do not simply cancel out positive ones. They undermine the coherence of the identity network that would otherwise drive loyalty (Vriens et al., 2026).

Why association density changes the economics

Here is where the framework stops being theoretical and starts being operational.

A destination with a single strong association, let’s say, great trails, has one reason for people to come. If a closer or newer trail system opens, that association is easily substituted. The functional need gets met elsewhere. Loyalty evaporates.

A destination with multiple, mutually reinforcing associations has something different. Great trails, plus a food culture worth talking about, plus a gathering space that feels like it belongs to someone, plus a sense that this community knows who it is and is glad you showed up. Those associations do not just add up. They connect to each other. Vriens and colleagues (2026) call this “connectedness,” the degree to which associations co-activate in a person’s mind. Connected associations are more durable and more predictive of spending than isolated ones.

This is what Bentonville, Arkansas figured out. The Walton Family Foundation invested hundreds of millions into trail infrastructure, and that investment was real and foundational. But what made Bentonville a destination rather than a day trip was the addition of Crystal Bridges Museum, a world-class dining scene, and a cultural identity that gave visitors a story to tell about themselves. The cycling industry generated $411 million in total economic impact across Northwest Arkansas (Trust for Public Land, 2025). Event economic impact doubled between 2023 and 2024 (Talk Business, 2025). Those numbers did not come from trails alone. They came from the density and connectedness of the associations visitors carried home.

Bentonville had advantages most places will never have. But the structural pattern, multiple associations tightly interconnected, is replicable. It just takes longer and requires more intentional sequencing. That is actually the harder and more interesting problem.

The meaning gap

There is a gap in how most communities think about place-based economic development. On one side of the gap sits the capital investment: the trail, the park, the streetscape, the amenity. On the other side sits the economic outcome: the lodging tax, the restaurant revenue, the housing demand, the job creation.

The gap between them is the memory layer. It is the set of associations that visitors carry home, the mental residue that determines whether they come back, how much they spend, and what they tell other people. Most planning processes skip this layer entirely. They build the amenity and measure the outcome and wonder why the numbers do not add up.

The research says the numbers do not add up because the associations are thin, or disconnected, or contaminated by friction. A destination can have world-class physical assets and still underperform economically if the memory structure it creates in visitors’ minds is shallow, functional, and easily substituted.

That is not a branding problem. It is not a marketing problem. It is a structural problem in how the destination is built, programmed, and experienced from arrival to departure.

What this looks like in the real world

In the next two installments of this series, I am going to apply this framework to a real place.

The Cuyuna Country State Recreation Area in north-central Minnesota is one of the most remarkable rural recreation transformation stories in the Upper Midwest. A community that took land abandoned by the mining industry, contaminated and written off, and turned it into a destination that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. The grassroots effort behind that transformation is genuinely extraordinary.

But the behavioral data tells a more complicated story. A story about what happens when a destination builds a world-class amenity without building the memory infrastructure around it. A story about who captures value and who does not. A story about the gap between the visitors who arrive and the community that hosts them.

The data involves gas station traffic, unmet restaurant demand, income disparities, overnight conversion rates, and the language visitors use when they describe the place. It is specific, sometimes uncomfortable, and grounded in what people actually do rather than what surveys say they prefer.

That is Part Two and Part Three.

For now, the takeaway is this.

Experience is a fine word for a brochure. Associations are what show up in your revenue.

People do not come back because they had an experience. They come back because a place attached itself to something they now believe about themselves, their time, or what is worth returning for.

This is part one of a three-part series on the economics of place meaning. Parts two and three examine the Cuyuna region, the data behind the day-tripper problem, and what Act Two of a trail economy actually has to look like.

References

Kim, J.-H., Ritchie, J. R. B., & McCormick, B. (2012). The antecedents of memorable tourism experiences: The development of a scale to measure the destination attributes associated with memorable experiences. Tourism Management, 44, 34-45.

Kim, H., Woo, E., & Uysal, M. (2018). The influence of tourism experience and well-being on place attachment. Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, 10, 149-158.

Wang, C., Zhang, J., Cao, J., & Hu, H. (2022). The relationship between place attachment and tourist loyalty: A meta-analysis. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 50, 310-319.

Zhang, H., Fu, X., Cai, L. A., & Lu, L. (2014). Destination image and tourist loyalty: A meta-analysis. Tourism Management, 40, 213-223.

Zhang, H., Xu, F., Leung, H. H., & Cai, L. A. (2021). Destination image and tourist behavioural intentions: A meta-analysis. Tourism Management, 83, 104278.

Vriens, M., Verhulst, R., Eggers, F., Narasimhan, S., & Condon, E. (2026, April 8). New research on how brand associations drive customer spending. Harvard Business Review.

Trust for Public Land. (2025). Economic benefits of mountain biking.

Souza, K. (2025, March 27). Bentonville’s economic impact from events doubled from 2023. Talk Business & Politics.