This chapter aims to contribute towards the improvement of using Experiential Marketing as a business model in Emerging Markets. This chapter also clarifies how experiential marketing fits within the Emerging marketing climate, and how to go about planning and evaluating it for best results. It provides examples focused on Emerging Markets ethics, market mix strategies, customer brand consumption experience and consumer word of mouth. The finding suggests how Experiential Marketing strategies can best utilize marketing communication channels to achieve Emerging Markets objectives. This chapter will encourage companies and brands in Emerging Markets to look into using experiential advertising in their marketing strategies. The chapter will focus on highlighting the connection between Emerging Markets and Experiential Marketing in different aspects, which then will be analyzed in order to determine how functional and successful Experiential Marketing can be. It concludes with analysis of demonstrating views from the public and experiential specialists.
TopIntroduction
In the twenty-first century of virtual connections, the use of Experiential marketing as a communication tool is highly used by brands and companies that believe, when it comes to connecting with consumers, there is nothing like a real experience. Experiential Marketing is about providing a live brand experience that gives consumers the opportunity to interact with the brand. While most traditional marketers continue to bombard consumers with thousands of messages per day, Experiential marketing has the power to reach consumers in a more direct and personal level.
The strategy of Emerging Markets (EMs) focuses on the central pillars of marketing segmentation, the key ingredients of product price, distribution and communication. It is characterized by non-traditional user behavior and the rise of new user groups. It means that, economic conditions and technology movement have reached a high stage where the wide majority of consumers have significantly greater replaceable income. As a result of growing industrialization and the increase in employment, the high-speed growth of EMs gives millions of consumers’ a new spending power as they tend to consider smaller sets of brands initially. Compared with other consumers in developed countries, they are less likely to change later to a brand that was not in their initial set. This issue increases the importance of adopting new advertising strategies in EMs to include new brands in the initial consumers consideration set. By achieving recognition through advertising and real communication, experience is the essential first step. The data introduced in this chapter reveal that word of mouth is more important in EMs, consumers will respond to products and brands that were able to establish an interaction that gives people an unexpected experience, and makes them not only remember it, but also talk about it.
This chapter has an exploratory approach and involved investigation of the existing literature reviews. The main chapter objective is to understand the role of experiential marketing and Word of Mouth marketing and how they create meaningful relationships between the customers and the brand. In order to prove how experiential marketing could be a future to EMs strategies and fits within its current marketing climate. The chapter is organized as follows:
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The first section introduces both EMs and Experiential Marketing definition, tool and characteristics.
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The second section introduces the connection between EMs and experiential marketing through five generic market aspects: 1) Market mix component, 2) Brand consumption experience, 3) The impact of word of mouth in consumer behavior, 4) EMs consumer segment and 5) Experiential market best practices. This through looking at what published statistical and survey data say about the EMs consumer segment, experiential market case studies.
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The third section contains first an analysis of experiential advertising case studies in EMs using the five market aspects, then the conclusion and the model approach presentation, and finally the recommendation for the use of experiential advertising in EMs.
TopBackground
The big rise of competition in the twenty-first century of virtual connections has made companies design new strategies focusing on customers in order to develop a competitive advantage to survive. To differentiate products by only using the traditional elements such as price, product and quality is no longer a competitive advantage. The use of experiential marketing as a communication tool is growing with smart brands and companies that believe in real customer experience. The Customer Experience is the next competitive field of battle (Gentile, 2007). Besides, the consumers have changed their demands nowadays; they are looking for consuming that stimulates emotions and sensations to satisfy not only their needs but also it has to be meaningful to them as an individual (Schmitt, 1999). A survey done by Morton (2009) bring out that the majority of marketers believed “experiential marketing builds customer relationships for the long term and it generates sales and leads in the short term, increases awareness of the product, drives word of mouth and can align internal audiences with business goals”.