Date of Award
2021
Document Type
Doctoral Thesis
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
Marketing & International Business
First Advisor
Dr Rose Leahy
Second Advisor
Dr Pio Fenton
Abstract
The nature of brand-customer relationships has long been the focus of marketers’ attentions, however, the competitive environment of the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods industry in the modern era, has significantly elevated the importance of that relationship in the literature. This is primarily due to the evolution of consumers’ needs and wants and their growing expectation of brands playing a key role in their daily lives. As a result, brands face the challenge of trying to communicate with their target audience through a multitude of marketing communications tools that both engages and excites them, while at the same time building effective memory structures which leads to brand recall, purchase and brand-customer relationships. In this landscape, experiential marketing has emerged as a way of creating authentic interactions with target markets that affords two-way communication and enables brand-consumer relationships to be cultivated. Research on experiential marketing has predominantly focused on the core philosophy of the concept, which is rooted in consumer behaviour literature, and on the benefits accruing to the consumer. Significantly, however, there is a distinct lack of emphasis on the theoretical development of the concept with little shared understanding in the collective body of work on experiential marketing regarding its application and evaluation, specifically in the FMCG industry. It is within this context that this thesis is positioned and from which two major contributions are extrapolated. The first contribution to the marketing literature is the Experiential Marketing Implementation Model. This framework emphasises a strategic approach to experiential marketing, while also firmly rooting it in the long-established Integrated Marketing Communications model. The second major contribution of this research is the Return on Integrated Experience Formula. This formula presents an all-encompassing method of evaluating experiential marketing, both in the short-term and significantly over the long-term, in the context of overall brand health. Taken together, these research contributions provide new and significant insights into experiential marketing. Through the distinct conceptual framework and the under-researched practitioner perspective, this study broadens understanding of both the application and evaluation of experiential marketing. As such, the research, makes theoretical contributions, not only to the literature on experiential marketing, but also on the development and maintenance of brand-customer relationships, indicating parameters and guidelines for the future development of those relationships using an experiential marketing approach.
Recommended Citation
Barry, Holly Anne, "An Exploration of Experiential Marketing in the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods Industry: Development of The Experiential Marketing Implementation Model and the Return on Integrated Experience Formula" (2021). Theses [online].
Available at: https://sword.cit.ie/allthe/23
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Access Level
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess