Twofold impact of experiential marketing: manufacturer brand and hosting retailer

Purpose: Experiential marketing is a technique through which companies enhance their promotional marketing with extensive sensory and imagery appeal in order to intensify consumers' experience. The purpose of this current empirical study is to address this strategy and suggests a conceptual framework to explain consumer attitude and behavior toward the promoted brand and the retailer store. Consumers' psychographic characteristics were added to enhance the novelty of the study. Design/methodology/approach: An experiential stimulating environment was created in a real retail store location. The study employs data collected during the experiential demonstration. Findings: The path model suggests that the intensity of the experience evokes an affective response toward the promoted brand and an indirect response toward the hosting retailer. Psychographic characteristics, such as the tendency to socialize and extrinsic cues, were found to moderate the effect of experiential marketing. Practical implications: Product manufacturers and suppliers can use experiential marketing techniques to improve affective and cognitive responses toward their products and brands. Experiential promotion should also be strategically encouraged by retailers because it creates a recreational shopping experience that enhances the retailer's image. Originality/value: The study is among the few empirical works that examine real-life settings and the double impact of experiential marketing on brand image and the retailer's store image. The study contributes to the existing literature by suggesting a path analysis model toward brand and store images, which combines the effect of experiential marketing with psychographic characteristics.