My graduation thesis was around this subject. The book "The Experience Economy" by Pine & Gilmore is a great start and generally regarded as the origin for the idea of experiences as products: http://www.amazon.com/The-Experience-Economy-Theater-Busines...
Well, I would argue that this performance based view has been at least around since Goffman's "The presentation of the self in evereryday life". Management research has already been paying close attention to this subject by the strategy-as-practce research approach, not to mention critical management/organization research. But this is definitely an exciting area with very interesting work coming of of that direction.