Does experiential marketing affect the behavior of luxury goods' consumers?

• Main Authors: Snakers, Elsa, Zajdman, Elise
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Umeå universitet, Handelshögskolan vid Umeå universitet 2010
• Subjects: marketing experiential marketing affect luxury; Business studies; Företagsekonomi
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-35801

Nowadays we are in a very competitive market where products have all very sustainable competitive advantages. It is difficult to find the difference between products. Finding a new way to reach this advantage of differentiation from one to another is becoming the key issue for companies to survive in this context. Traditional marketing strategies focusing on price or quality are not anymore a long-term source of differentiation and competitive advantage. A way to reach differentiation is by means of a much stronger focus on the customer. Experiential marketing is this new way by making the customers living an experience through the creation of emotions. Experiential marketing has for goal to create emotions to the customer that lead to enjoy an experience for the consumer and affect his attitude and behavior. It is very useful as a differentiation strategy to sell utilitarian product from everyday life. However aesthetic products like art or luxury products created by the genius of artists and couturiers create emotions by themselves. So, we focused on the luxury goods field because we wanted to know if experiential marketing had an effect on consumers in this field even if luxury goods products already create emotions by themselves. Moreover, some people are more sensitive to emotions and aesthetic than others. We also wanted to know if experiential marketing had an impact on these people. Our paper tries to go further on this subject by comparing to types of store of the company Lancel (a luxury company of leather goods) one is using experiential marketing and the other is not. For our research we first had to read scientific articles, books and previous studies on emotions and experiential marketing. Then, we developed three hypotheses which helped us to conduct our research and draw conclusions. Those hypotheses have been discussed by conducting a mixed research that is to say by combining a qualitative research with a quantitative one. In the quantitative research we compared the emotions felt and the purchase intention in the different stores of Lancel to see if the store which uses experiential marketing has better results. In the qualitative research we wanted to know the reasons why Lancel has developed this new concept of store. The quantitative research was conducted by administrating questionnaires in the different stores of Lancel. We had a deductive approach. The qualitative research, based on a descriptive approach, was carried out by creating structured interviews. The results we were enable to get thanks to these data, allowed us to draw conclusions regarding our research. In this paper, we compare emotions people feel in a store that uses experiential marketing and in a one which doesn‘t to see if there are differences in their attitude and behavior due to experiential marketing.