Abstract

Experiential marketing has been defined as when companies intentionally employ services as the stage and goods as props to engage individual customers in such a way that it creates a memorable event (Pine and Gilmore, 1999). With a well-executed experiential marketing strategy, companies are able to charge a higher premium for their offerings and, as a result, see their profit margins increase. However, the scramble to achieve a presence among experience providers, combined with a lack of knowledge of what experiential marketing is all about and how it can be used for commercial advantage, has led many companies to rush to design and implement experiential marketing. Sadly, with little idea as to what they want to achieve by means of experiential marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy, these companies often have ended up dissatisfying rather than delighting their customers (Brown, 2009). Despite a considerable amount of literature on the topic (cf. Christensen, 2009; Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; Lindgreen et al., 2009; Schmitt, 2003; Shaw and Ivens, 2005; Smith and Wheeler, 2002; Tynan and McKechnie, 2009), holes remain to be filled and new fields need to be explored. Thus the overall objective of this mini special issue is to provide research and case insight in experiential marketing in food retailing.