The Use of Experiential Marketing as a Tool for Achieving Customer Satisfaction

Diplomarbeit von Vera Rivera

Abstract:

Have you ever been treated disrespectfully as a customer and therefore decided not to purchase anything and left the retail space? I have, and most consumers do almost every day in every kind of situation.

Every day, companies lose clients who are dissatisfied with them, their products or their service. The underlying reason for this is that businesses do not know how to treat their customers the right way. In addition, instead of aiming to keep them, the firms attempt to gain new clients instead. This is problematic as it is more effective and less cost-intensive to retain one’s current consumers than to obtain new ones. Moreover, most of these companies consider themselves to be customer-orientated, which means that all their activities need to be focused on fulfilling the needs and wants of the end-user.

However, although these companies regard customer-orientation as a key competitive advantage, they have difficulties in building a relationship with the customer. In order to work in a customer-focused way, they need to learn how to put their knowledge about consumers from marketing research into practice. The correct processing of research data helps to identify what the customer really needs and wants. This way, marketers can better discover the consumer’s desires, which in turn results in customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is one of the first successful effects of a customer-orientated marketing strategy that aims to build, guarantee and improve profitable connections with the customer.

But satisfying customers is not as easy as it once was. According to Levermann, although more and more products and services are constantly appearing in the already saturated markets, these goods are increasingly similar in appearance as well as in function. In addition, all goods in the maturity stage already fulfil the standard of quality, which is why all the products and services become interchangeable and cannot be differentiated from each other any more. The increased saturation of the markets results in an intensified competition of companies for the market shares of their rivals. This battle is also an enormous challenge for marketers as the demand for their goods is decreasing and it is simultaneously becoming more difficult to arouse the customer’s attention. By advertising all the products and services in the markets, which are constantly growing in number, the consumer is overloaded with marketing information so that in the end he is not able to perceive every marketing message.

As a consequence of this information overload people have developed a low involvement with advertising and marketing information in general, which has lead to the individual starting to select from the information before he has even really perceived it. Involvement is defined as „the level of perceived personal importance and/or interest evoked by a stimulus within a specific situation”. Thus, instead of strengthening the price competition in the markets, marketers must search for other means to communicate effectively with their possible purchasers and end-users. Furthermore, the companies need to find new ways to differentiate their goods from their competitors’.

An effective approach for marketers and companies to achieve this goal is by concentrating on what the consumer needs and wants. Due to a change in values in society there is a high demand for engaging experiences which give people the feeling that they are truly experiencing life. „…Experiences have emerged as the next step in what we call the progression of economic value.“. Consequently, there is a need for goods that have this experiential value.

The same demand is placed on marketing, which needs to enrich people’s lives through experiences that appeal to their needs and wants. A new way of thinking of marketing, which has been given the name experiential marketing by Bernd Schmitt provides a means to attain this. Experiential marketers can associate individual experiences with their brands, which will differentiate them from rival products. As the first step to a productive relationship of a customer to a good is a satisfied customer, the following chapters will describe how experiential marketing is able to achieve consumer satisfaction.

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