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ROLE OF EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING STRATEGY USING
INTERNET TO ENHANCE THE EXPERIENCES OF CONSUMERS
A STUDY ON SELECTION OF HOTEL THROUGH WEBSITES

Aditi Ghode,
Pratima Dabholkar
K. J. Somaiya Institute of Management Studies & Research
Vidyavihar (East), Mumbai 400077
University of Mumbai


Abstract

Experiences have been counted for long lasting memories which every human being
recollects easily. Therefore, market researchers started understanding the importance of
creation and retention of experiences for the customers. This purpose, recent studies
regarding experiences are given much attention in the field of marketing, which considered as
experiential marketing. So it has been studied that experiential marketing is a unique
approach to the task of marketing, it is a concept that integrates elements of emotions, logic,
and general thought processes to connect with the customers. The goal of experiential
marketing is to establish the connection in such a way that the customer responds to a product
offering based on both emotional and rational response levels. Recently in India, importance
of tourism has increased due the revenue generation & visitors priority to spend money for
leisure activities. Tourism is known as service industry, where many times customer selects
their hotel through the online booking method by browsing hotel website. Providing
maximum experiences about the happening at hotel will be a challenging work to do on the
website, to attract maximum number of customers. This research paper will be useful to the
hotel industry to understand how to maximize the experiences of their customers when they
select & reserve hotel through hotel website.

Keywords: Experiential Marketing, Online Experiences, Hotel industry, Customer
Satisfaction.



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Introduction:

Experiences have been considered as the next step in the evolution of marketing offering
strategies, from commodities to good, goods to services & now it is moving from services to
experiences to attract more & more people and covert them into potential customers. In this
conception, experiences are hedonic consumption events that cleverly integrate services
as the stage and goods as the props to engage individual customers in a way that [is]
memorable (Pine II and Gilmore 1998, p. 98). Experiential marketing plays an important
role in the process of consumption experience (Pine & Gilmore, 1998, 1999; Schmitt, 1999).
That means it is better for service providers to understand customers consumption reaction
after receiving stimulations of experiential designs. Also it provides the positive effects on
the customers while reserving the products or services after having some experience about
the product or service. Due to this experiences people tend to buy or reserve the product or
service easily, which is a good marketing strategy to attract the customers.

Using this strategy for online buyers always helps people to get maximum information &
experiences about any product or service. With the usage of attractive websites, it becomes
possible to provide the product or service experiences for attracting the online customers
easily without wasting more time & money.

Tourism is known as a service industry, or the recreation industry or the industry of
experience (Barlow & Maul, 2000). Hotel is an important element, where customers make
themselves comfortable and enjoy their leisure experience most. To enhance the level of
satisfaction, use of experiential marketing strategy helps. Most of the time customers do the
hotel reservation in advance through internet. Based on the photographs & video uploaded on
the website, creates some image about the hotel & its leisure activities. Consumer uses this
image to get an experience about the hotel. For which it is very important to design the hotel
website in such a way that it will show the customers what exactly they are looking for by
providing maximum experiences of hotel and their activities.

This study tries to find the factors which are important to design the online experiences for a
hotel industry through which maximum people gets attracted towards selecting the hotel
online. This study involved a survey, comprised of data related to customers perceptions of
experiential marketing, customers perceived experiential value and customers satisfaction.

Background:

Csikszentmihalyi (1993) argued that experience stands out from normal daily experience and
is characterized by the following experiences: total absorption, lack of focus on self, feeling
of freedom, enriched perception, increased sensitivity to feelings, increased intensity of
emotions, and decreased awareness of time.

Pine and Gilmore (1999) explain:
When a person buys a service, he purchases a set of intangible activities carried out on his
behalf. But when he buys an experience, he pays to spend time enjoying a series of
memorable events that a company states as in a theatrical play to engage him in a
personal way. (p. 2)


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A number of researchers argued that the service economy has been transformed into an
attention economy (Davenport & Beck, 2002), entertainment economy (Wolf, 1999), a dream
society (Jensen, 1999), emotion economy (Gobe & Zyman, 2001), and now an experience
economy (Pine & Gilmore, 1998, 1999; Schmitt, 1999). So it is becoming important to
provide the maximum experiences to attract the maximum number of customers.

Schmitt (1999) stated that experiential marketing differs from traditional marketing that
experiential marketing provides a set of value involving sensory, emotional, cognitive and
relation, elicits customers to sense, feel, think, act, and relate instead of focusing on
functional features-and-benefits (F&B) marketing. There is a need to change the traditional
marketing techniques as it does not provide much of effect for attracting customers. In
marketing, it is important to form the strategies in such a way that the maximum number of
customers will get attracted and it is possible by providing the experience of the product or
service to the customers. So it becomes very important to change the marketing strategies
from traditional marketing to experiential marketing.

Experience are inherently emotional and personal; many factors are beyond the control of
management such as personal interpretation of a situation based on cultural background, prior
experience, mood, sensation seeking personality traits, and many other factors (Hirschman &
Holbrook, 1982; Zuckerman, 1971). So it becomes important to identify & understand those
factors, which directly or indirectly affects the experiences of the customer while
experiencing any product or service. Schmitt (1999) also indicated that experiential
marketing can be used beneficially in many situations including: (a) to turn around a
declining brand, (b) to differentiate a product from competition, (c) to create an image and
identity for a corporation, (d) to promote innovations, and (e) to induce trial, purchase and,
most important, loyal consumption.

In Information technology, use of internet is playing very important role. The Internet has
been around in some form since the 1960s. The travel industry has shown a marked change
in how it does business with the growth of the Internet. According to the Travel Industry
Association (Patkose, Stokes, and Cook, 2003), nearly half of the adult population (18+) uses
the Internet for travel planning, while one in four use it to make travel reservations. The
share of online travelers using the Internet to book business trips has also risen from 25% in
2002 to 28% in 2003. Nearly half of those planning trips online say they do most or all of
their travel planning on the Internet, compared to 42% in 2002 (Patkose, Stokes, & Cook,
2003). Research notes that 70% of households that travel and have access to the Internet
research their travel plans online (Minor, 2003). This is an important fact for hotels to
understand. A consumer who is planning a vacation will have to be able to access information
on a hotel online to choose that hotel for a vacation. A property that is not online will be at a
serious disadvantage. Many hotels became victims of their lack of understanding how the
Internet worked. Several major online discounters took advantage of the situation and
increased market share at the expense of hotels direct distribution (Starkov, 2002).

Consumer satisfaction is generally defined as an evaluative response to the perceived
outcome of a particular consumption experience (Cadotte, Woodruff & Jenkins, 1987; Day,
1984; Westbrook & Oliver, 1981; Yi, 1990). Consumer satisfaction is a post-purchase
attitude formed through a mental comparison of the quality the customer perceives actually
receiving from the exchange (Spreng, Mackenzie, & Olshavsky, 1996; Olive & Swan, 1989;
Olive 1980). In context of tourism, satisfaction relates to a visitors experience which is

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perceived to be the end state of a psychological progress (Oliver, 1989). Past literature
operationalized satisfaction by defining it as the quality of a visitors experience, which is the
psychological outcome arising from his or her participation in a recreation activity. There are
two reasons to utilize consumer satisfaction to assess service performance. First, consumer
satisfaction is experiential and unique to the consumer; that is, consumer satisfaction depends
on the consumers subjective perception and evaluation of service performance rather than
the organizations objective standards of quality (oliver, 1999). In other words, it is important
to focus on consumer satisfaction that addresses the importance of understanding the
consumer when making marketing decisions. For this reason, the investigation of overall
consumer satisfaction has important managerial implications.

Information satisfaction was a common finding among hotel web site researchers (Jeong et
al., 2003; Law and Hsu, 2005). Jeong et al. (2003) identified informational satisfaction as the
most powerful determinant of intent to purchase. This finding was supported in another
study which found that 88 percent of first-time web site visitors return if the first visit is
successful, while only 40 percent of visitors who were not successful on their first visit will
return (Scheuler, 2005). Jeong et al. (2005) found information completeness and ease of use
to be the most important determinants of web site quality. These findings not only reinforce
the importance of having a well-designed, user friendly web site, but they also reinforce the
importance of examining the changes in online consumer behavior.

As hotel distribution on the internet evolves, so does the need for research in this area.

Hotel distribution web sites now feature user-generated comments and ratings, which has led
to research examining patterns in guest comments and ratings (OConnor, 2008; Stringam
and Gerdes, 2010; Ye et al., 2009).

Research Methodology

Previous research related to experiential marketing, online experiences, customer satisfaction
and hotel industry focused instruments independently. For this reason, this research used a
survey instrument that incorporated all these factors together to collect the data for the
analysis to prove the following hypothesis-

H1: Consumers perception of experiential marketing directly influenced perceived online
experiential value of consumers.
H2: Consumers perception of online experiential value directly influenced consumer
satisfaction.
H3: Consumer satisfaction directly influenced online hotel reservation.
H4: Consumers perception of online experiential value indirectly influenced online hotel
reservation through consumer satisfaction.
H5: Consumers perception of experiential marketing indirectly influenced online hotel
reservation through perceived online experiential value and consumer satisfaction.

In the research methodology, it describes the research design used to find and form the
relationship among the variables such as, experiential marketing, online experiences,
perceived experiential value, and customer satisfaction. A pilot study assessed the clarity and
reliability of the survey instrument. A sample asked to complete the survey after they were
interviews to assess understanding of the questions asked. For this study, target population

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covered under this project is the people who are well verse with computer & internet. To
ensure wide cross section of the sample, people from different age group, income level and
locations were selected to represent the City. A total 600 questionnaires were distributed
among the people considering different area, different age group, different income level,
education level and gender. Out of that only 450 valid questionnaires were selected the rest
invalid questionnaires were discarded to get the correct analysis.

To address content validity, previous research was utilized to build coherent justification for
the themes and codes (Creswell, 2009). Concurrent validity was verified through the repeated
themes of the respondents. Intercoder reliability was checked and data was compared to the
code definitions throughout the coding process (Creswell, 2009). A Krippendorffs alpha =
0.897 was obtained as an overall measure of intercoder reliability, where 0.8 is considered
acceptable for most research (Lombard et al., 2002). There were several instances where the
researchers opinions of the reliability of the results may have been in question. These
concerns are noted in the results.

Findings

Hypothesis testing was carried out followed by construct validity, factorization, and
correlation between sub-variables with its main variable with the help of SPSS version 12.

Hypothesis 1

Hypothesis 1 shows the relationship between two variables namely experiential marketing
and perceived online experiential value. The value in the result of correlation test is 0.676,
which shows strong / high correlation between both the variables as the value is exceeding
0.501 (Bruin, 2006). The correlation result shows that independent variables are somewhat
correlated with each other. This shows there is an association between experiential marketing
and perceived online experiential value of consumers.

Hypothesis 2

Hypothesis 2 shows the relationship between two variables namely perceived online
experiential value and consumer satisfaction. The value in the result of correlation test is
0.559, which shows strong / high correlation between both the variables as the value is
exceeding 0.501 (Bruin, 2006). The correlation result shows that independent variables are
somewhat correlated with each other. This shows there is an association between perceived
online experiential value and consumer satisfaction.

Hypothesis 3

Hypothesis 3 shows the relationship between two variables namely consumer satisfaction and
online hotel reservation. The value in the result of correlation test is 0.470, which shows low
correlation between both the variables as the value is not exceeding 0.501 (Bruin, 2006). The
correlation result shows that independent variables are not correlated with each other. This
shows there is no association between consumer satisfaction and online hotel reservation.



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Hypothesis 4

Hypothesis 4 shows the relationship between three variables directly or indirectly namely
Consumers perception of online experiential value, consumer satisfaction and online hotel
reservation. The value in the result of correlation test is exceeding 0.501 (Bruin, 2006), which
shows there is a correlation among all 3 variables. The correlation result shows that
independent variables are somewhat correlated with each other. This shows there is an
association between Consumers perception of online experiential value, consumer
satisfaction and online hotel reservation.

Hypothesis 5

Hypothesis 5 shows the relationship between all main variables directly or indirectly namely
experiential marketing, Consumers perception of online experiential value, consumer
satisfaction and online hotel reservation. The value in the result of correlation test is
exceeding 0.501 (Bruin, 2006), which shows there is a correlation among all 3 variables. The
correlation result shows that independent variables are somewhat correlated with each other.
This shows there is an association between all main variables directly or indirectly namely
experiential marketing, Consumers perception of online experiential value, consumer
satisfaction and online hotel reservation.

Conclusions

According to existing hospitality literature, effort to date has not provided conceptual and
empirical studies that considered the relationships among variables of experiential marketing,
perceived online experiential value, consumer satisfaction, and online hotel reservation.

Thus, the results of the present study were to provide preliminary evidence that an integrated
approach was indeed a potential avenue for future research in experiential marketing,
perceived online experiential value, consumer satisfaction, and online hotel reservation in the
hospitality industry.

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship among experiential marketing,
perceived online experiential value, consumer satisfaction, and online hotel reservation.

In order to clarify the relationship, correlation analysis were utilized to conceptualize the
relationship among variables of experiential marketing, perceived online experiential value,
consumer satisfaction, and online hotel reservation with three measurement sub-models.

The existing literature in the area of experiential marketing suggested three sub models such
as for experiential marketing (sense, feel, think, act, and relate), for Consumer Perceived
Experiential Value (service excellence, Aesthetic Appeal, Consumer return on Investment,
and playfulness), and for Online Hotel Reservation (ease of use, security, and willingness).

With the help of these sub models, this research tried to find the relationship among the
defined variables. Apart from these relations, demographic information was used for
classification of population using gender, age, education qualification, occupation, marital
status, and monthly household income.


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Recommendations for future research

Since the five dimensions of experiential marketing are only constituted to reflect the
construct of experiential marketing in this study, it can perhaps be useful if future work can
further investigate the impact of each dimension on the perceived experiential value,
consumer satisfaction, and online hotel reservation.

Because measuring emotions (consumers perceived experiential value and satisfaction) are
quite complex and challenging, there are many challenging opportunities available for
integrating qualitative approach to obtain in-depth information from consumer satisfaction.

Future study can create a composite model to do more in-depth study for the hotel industry.

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