Experiential marketing of tourism: an exploratory model

Marketing is a dynamic phenomenon and marketing as a discipline has evolved overtime, the current era of marketing is evolving from the service dominant logic (S-D) as proposed by Vargo & Lusch (2004), to co-creation experiences (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004). Experiential marketing orientation is the most contemporary of marketing discipline (Williams 2006) and is in sync with the service dominant logic. The notion of value has changed and it no more resides in goods or services but in consumer's utility expressed in terms of experience (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004; Ramaswamy, 2011). The organized tourism as we see today started as a bundled array of exotic cultural experiences, supplied to the markets. The end product of tourism industry is experience and the memories of experience; it includes both the instant events and extended events. This paper aims to explore a framework for understanding tourism through the lens of experiential marketing. As experiential marketing is evolving, getting acceptance and seen as a tool for distinguished differentiation from the competitors (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004), the need for understanding the way a consumer experiences a product and the various stages involved in it need to be further explored and empirically tested. The value of experience can be seen as a continuum between the goal directed/economic values to altruistic-hedonic 'end-in-itself' kind of experiences (Holbrook, 2005, 2006). The way experience is defined in the literature varies on the phenomenological perspective taken in past researches. Walls et al. (2011) provide a detail survey of the literature and have found almost twenty different definitions of experience. The experiences associated with various parts of tourism product like lodging, atmospherics, food and services (Walls et al., 2011) have been looked into discretely, but not much research has gone into understanding the holistic tourist experience and how it is recorded in the memory (to cherish!) as an end product, though a few exceptions exist like Walls et al. (2011). The subjective personal introspection and autoethnography has been suggested as a good tool to understand the value of consumption experience to the consumer (Holbrook, 2005, 2006), but how the tourism experience is different from the daily consumption experience, keeping in mind that tourism is seen as an interruption of routine life and away from usual place of inhabitance. Tourism when consumed provides with experiences that can be classified as Instant events e.g. having a coffee at some restaurant and long episodic memories e.g. planning and execution of the travel. With the support of developments in the field of human autobiographic memory and the existing frameworks of consumption experience (Holbrook 2005, 2006; Walls et al 2011; Schmitt 1999) the authors suggest a conceptual model that proposes the role of emotionally charged, "flashbulb like memories" in enhancing the tourist experience, memorability of tourist experience and thus destination image.