The Role of Experiential Marketing in a Retail Chain Repositioning. A Field Experiment

Experiential marketing is nowadays considered the most innovative way to differ strategically from competitors. By creating new and holistic consumers’ experiences, it aims at brand positioning or re-posizioning. Different tools to succeed with the experiential perspective are suggested to firms. Within these tools, the design of a high involvement shopping experience plays a key role, since it represents a valuable approach to change consumers’ attitudes and behaviors. By the way, while the relevance of experiential marketing is well recognized in the international literature, there is an evident lack of rigorous measurement with reference to their results. Our assumption is that if we adopt the perspective of experiential marketing and emotional brand management, which state that these marketing policies aim at improving the brand positioning, we should deeply look at the experience that consumers go through, and their attitudes towards the brand. This project aims at filling this gap between experiential marketing strategies and management, and the measurement of strategic performance. Measuring the performance of marketing policies aimed at improving the brand positioning, therefore, becomes important for driving their investments. Our research question is: What is the contribution of experiential marketing investments to brand positioning? In order to give answer to the research question, we realized a field experiment. In particular, since we are interested in specific marketing investments based on creating direct interactions and immersions in physical environments, we will focus on events and product tests in store. Indeed, they are recognized as very powerful instruments to involve consumers and to communicate firms’ ideas, concepts and values by immerging them in a particular environment which delivers those elements considered to be relevant (Schmitt, 1999). We analyze a retail chain of electronic product; some stores of the retail chain analyzed planned to improve their image, leaving the low-profile mass-market positioning to become the "luxury outlets for electronics". This goal is pursued through investments in the realization, according to the principles of experiential marketing, of an area devoted to the "domotic home where consumers would be immersed in the environment, touching, using and experiencing all the characteristics of the offer. Our study uses a two-group pretest/posttest quasi-experimental design, with the visit to the shop as experimental treatment. The positioning goals have been measured with three dependent variables: Attitude Toward Brand (Sengupta, Fitzimons, 2004 and Kirmani, Shiv, 1998), Brand Claim Recognition (Garretson and Burton, 2005), and Purchase Intention and in the pre-event survey includes a series of variables related to individuals: Need for Cognition Scale (Cacioppo, Petty and Keng Fao 1984), Interpersonal Influence Scale (Bearden, Netemeyer and Teel 1989), Fashion Leadership Scale (Goldsmith, Freiden and Kilsheimer 1993). The questionnaire we use on the post-event survey includes a series of variables concerning the emotional intensity of the event and product test, namely Richins Consumption Emotion Set (1997), the involvement toward the generated experience, measured with Unger and Kernan (1983) Involvement in the Activity Scale, along with the three dependent variables used in the pre-event questionnaire. This work aims at contributing to the marketing literature with regard to the following topics: the definition of a possible measurement of experiential marketing investments efficacy for brand positioning. The rigorous marketing methodology applied here is unusual for such stream of research, which traditionally adopts classical qualitative and widely applied tools. The link between experiential marketing and brand management, by pointing out the contribution of the experiential providers to brand positioning, is explored. The results of the experiment will be presented, as well as the managerial implications for those willing to adopt experiential marketing principles to differentiate their brand.