The importance of providing an experience that will make the customer feel special is better understood by businesses today. It is essential for businesses to consider customer experiences, experiential value, and experiential quality with a strategic management approach focused on market success, target profitability, and global brand image. In this chapter, the concepts of experiential value, experiential quality, and the relationship between experiential value and experiential quality are examined. The chapter aims to reveal the role and importance of experiential value and experiential quality in achieving a competitive advantage for businesses. Studies in the literature show that experiential value and experiential quality reveal that it is effective in consumer decisions such as customer satisfaction, repurchase, and recommendation. Hence, businesses need to determine their marketing strategies by taking into account what kind of experience their customers want to have with their products and services.
TopIntroduction
With globalization, competition conditions in the market also change. However, in the face of rapid developments in technology, businesses tend to adapt to this process to increase their competitive power. On the other hand, the change observed in consumer preferences and new purchasing habits raises the need for businesses to update their working conditions and marketing strategies.
Meeting consumers' changing preferences and expectations with unforgettable and extraordinary experiences becomes a business differentiation tool. It is not enough for consumers to meet their expectations with innovative and superior quality products or services. Businesses develop their marketing strategies to provide a memorable experience, one step beyond selling products and services. This change in both the consumer and business front; led to the transition from the service economy to the experience economy. The economic value offered to the target market today; As an experience, it meets consumer needs and expectations.
Pine and Gilmore (1998) discussed the concept of experience economy for the first time in their study called “Welcome to the Experience Economy. “They stated that businesses follow a natural process of commodities, goods, services, and experiences to increase economic value. They emphasized that businesses have moved to create an experience in this economic value series since goods and services are no longer sufficient to differentiate themselves. They expressed this new economy, in which experience came to the fore, as the experience economy.
In today's market conditions, customer satisfaction is not a good indicator of success in keeping the customer. It is necessary to offer a different value beyond satisfaction to customers. At this point, experiential marketing helps create this difference that businesses need (Özgören Şen, 2017). The purpose of marketing is to make sales unnecessary. The purpose of experience creation is to make marketing unnecessary. Experience-creating businesses are innovative businesses and enable customers to participate in the product or service-related process with the new experiences they create (Gilmore & Pine, 2002).
Traditional marketing sees the consumer as a rational decision-maker who is only interested in functional features and utility. However, in experiential marketing, the consumer is thought to be rational and emotional individuals interested in experiences that give them pleasure. The main purpose in experiential marketing is to provide holistic experiences to the customer (Schmitt, 1999). With understanding the importance of consumer experiences, experiential marketing emerges as a part of modern marketing understanding. Apart from the superior benefits of the product or service, it is a critical and essential member of the consumer experience with the unique experiences offered to the consumer. It reveals the effect of the company on the marketing efforts by sharing the positive and negative experiences, satisfaction, or disappointment around it.
In this part of the book, the concepts of experiential value and experiential quality are mainly examined. This book chapter section will consist of the introduction, background, primary focus, solutions, recommendations, future research directions, and conclusion.
TopBackground
Today, consumers are heavily exposed to marketing-oriented communication efforts of products, services, brands, or businesses. Developments in communication technologies and the active participation of consumers in social media both facilitate and intensify these efforts. Consumers remember their past experiences more quickly and reveal their behavioral intention with this feeling with the messages conveyed to them. At this point, businesses have started to include experiential marketing practices in their marketing efforts.
Holbrook and Hirschman (1982) emphasize that consumption has an experiential element and the consumption experience; they define it as a personal formation, often of significant emotional importance, established in interaction with a stimulus when consuming products and services. The experience is the sum of the logical, emotional, and other experiences that the person has acquired from an activity (Aho, 2001); they are experiences that are unique, memorable, sustainable, and enthusiastically shared by customers through word-of-mouth communication (Pine & Gilmore, 1998).