Consumer Immersion in Aesthetic Experiences at Arts Exhibitions: Implications for Marketing the Arts

It has been widely recognized that consumption experience constitutes the core of consumers’ value. Managerial principles derive from the analysis of the aesthetic experience, which is by definition the highest level experience, because of its high level of emotions, involvement, immersion and no distance between the work of art and the consumer. Companies have learnt how to turn their products into experiences. However, no studies have addressed what happens when the experiential marketing principles are applied to arts and culture. To address this issue, our paper presents an experiential approach to study the consumption experience in an art exhibition that has been organized by adopting the experiential and marketing principles. By analyzing subjective introspective reports and ethnographic researches we find that this strategy can develop some benefits for consumers, but it is also very risky, since consumers can perceive the situation as too coercing.