JOURNAL OF

MARKETING
MANAGEMENT

Experience marketing: a review and reassessment

Caroline Tynan, Nottingham University Business School, UK*
Sally McKechnie, Nottingham University Business School, UK*

Abstract For the last twenty-five years customer experiences have been
considered to be a key concept in marketing management, consumer behaviour,
services marketing and retailing with the result that the underlying logic and
managerial rationale for experience marketing is well established in the marketing
literature. However, the gulf between academics and practitioners on this topic
is now as wide as ever with bestselling titles on experience marketing written
by and for practitioners, which are rich in examples and step-by-step guides to
managerial success yet pay scant attention to the contributions of academics in
this area. The purpose of this paper is to review and reassess the extant work on
experience marketing. Service-Dominant logic is employed to bridge the divide
between theory and practice in this respect. A model of customer’s experience
proposed, implications for practitioners and academics are discussed and greater
dialogue is called for between marketers and their academic counterparts.

Keywords Experience marketing, Customer experience, Consumer behaviour,

Service-Dominant logic.

INTRODUCTION

Over the last twenty-five years experience marketing has been a topical issue. Ever
since Holbrook and Hirschman first introduced the influential idea that consumer
behaviour has an experiential dimension (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982; Hirschman
and Holbrook 1982) and postulated the experiential perspective as an alternative to
the hegemonic information processing view to understanding consumer behaviour,
there has been an increasing recognition amongst academics and practitioners of the

*Correspondence details and biographies for the authors are located at the end of the article.

JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT, 2009, Vol. 25, No. 5-6, pp. 501-517
ISSN0267-257X print /ISSN1472-1376 online © Westburn Publishers Ltd. doi: 10.1362/026725709X461821
502 JMM Journal of Marketing Management, Volume 25

need for marketers to have a deeper understanding of the role of customer experiences
in influencing how customers behave particularly in a services marketing or retailing
context. Whilst academics have further developed these initial contributions (Grewal,
Levy and Kumar 2009; Verhoef et al. 2009; Healy et al. 2007; Frow and Payne 2007;
Arnold and Reynolds 2003; Carù and Cova 2003; Winsted, 2000; and Thompson
and Haytko 1997), marketing practitioners and consulting gurus have long displayed
a similar interest in customer experiences and consistently advocated the importance
of experience marketing with key contributions by Carbone and Haeckel (1994),
Pine and Gilmore (1999, 1998), Gilmore and Pine (1997) and the consulting guru
cum academic Schmitt (2003a, 1999a and b). Equally experience marketing has also
been widely addressed in the practitioner press (Johnson 2007; Leighton, 2007b;
Event 2006; Bielski 2004). In a recent survey of marketing professionals 70% of the
respondents reported it to be very important to their organisations and indicated
their intention to employ it more widely in the future (Bigham 2008).
Nevertheless the gulf between academics and practitioners in this area is now as
wide as ever since many of the bestselling titles on experience marketing written by
and for practitioners remain rich in examples and step-by-step guides to managerial
success yet pay scant attention to the contributions of academics to developing
knowledge and understanding of experience marketing (Holbrook 2006b, 2007a,
b and c). The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the extant work
on experience marketing in order to establish ways of bridging the divide between
theory and practice in this respect. This exercise may be considered timely because
the new “open source” theory of Service-Dominant (S-D) logic first presented by
Vargo and Lusch (2004) also stresses the importance of experiences in marketing.
S-D logic offers an understanding of marketing that emphasises the marketing of
service and not of goods or services, to be achieved through dialogue, the co-creation
of value with network partners and a focus on experiences. Indeed this unusually
consistent and growing level of attention and convergence on a particular aspect
of marketing and consumption by so many groups of researchers and practitioners
places this topic at the focal point of interest of all parts of the academy and, as such,
confirms that this topic warrants a review.
The paper proceeds first by acknowledging the lack of clarity in the marketing
literature with regard to what exactly constitutes an experience and the conflation
of terms associated with experience marketing. Next, the practitioners’ perspective
is reviewed followed by a summary of key academic contributions on experience
marketing, before discussing how S-D logic’s new marketing grounded understandings
of value and exchange emphasise the active role of customers in co-creating a valuable
holistic experience of the service as opposed to products and services per se. Finally
it is proposed that this new dominant research paradigm could potentially help to
bridge the divide between theory and practice in experience marketing. Implications
for practitioners and academics are discussed.

SETTING THE SCENE

Poulsson and Kale (2004) observe that until 2004 there were no systematic attempts
to define exactly what constitutes an experience in marketing terms. A deal of
the disagreement and lack of clarity lies in the different ways in which the term
“experience” can be understood. It is both a noun and a verb and it is used variously
 Tynan and McKechnie Experience marketing: a review and reassessment 503

to convey the process itself, participating in the activity, the affect or way in which
an object, thought or emotion is felt through the senses or the mind, and even the
outcome of an experience by way of a skill or learning for example. Therefore, it is
not clear whether to experience is active or passive for the participant, whether it
must result in particular outcomes like learning or skill development or whether it
requires interaction or not.
In their influential paper Pine and Gilmore (1998, p. 98) state that an experience
occurs “when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to
engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event”. This view fixes
the experience firmly in the practitioners’ domain but also includes the customer.
More recently practitioners have explicitly included web-based interactive media
alongside this as an economical, accessible and effective tool for creating and staging
experiences (Smilansky 2009; Jack Morton Worldwide 2007) and thus incorporating
the virtual world’s mediated experiences along with the real world’s lived experiences
as part of experience marketing.

THE PRACTITIONERS’ PERSPECTIVE

The rise of and continued interest in experience marketing is in part due to the current
challenges facing marketing practitioners. These challenges include the increasing
difficulties of differentiating goods and services in the marketplace (Carbone and
Haeckel 1994), the recognition of the importance of customer experiences in the
development of customer advocacy (Allen, Reichheld and Hamilton 2005) and
the drive to achieve competitive advantage (Gentile, Spiller and Noci 2007) while
simultaneously achieving a reduction in the costs of production interactions (Prahalad
and Ramaswamy 2004), which is even more pertinent in the current recession.
Active and pleasure seeking consumers look for “fantasy, feelings and fun” through
consumption (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982) which has served to popularise
experience marketing as it has given rise to the need to entertain, stimulate and
emotionally affect consumers through the consumption experience (Schmitt 1999a).
New technology has facilitated both the real and virtual world interaction which
enables experience marketing for consumers, many of whom are now members of
brand communities who “act as the living manifestation of the brand’s personality
and relationship with consumers” (McWilliam 2000, p. 54). The recognition of the
importance of customer advocacy and the wide-scale adoption of the Net Promoter
measure (Tiltman 2007; Reichheld 2006) has motivated the adoption of experience
marketing as personally relevant marketing experiences can generate brand advocacy,
loyalty and word of mouth (Smilansky 2009; Blazinstar 2007). So it is this changing
context, where marketing practitioners need an innovative solution to obtain
competitive advantage, customers increasingly seek pleasure over functional benefits,
and a relatively cheap, enabling technology has become widely available, that has
promoted the widespread practitioner interest in the approach.
There is a fairly extensive but fragmented literature on experience marketing.
However, much of the work published by consultants, practitioners and self-
help gurus is of limited worth. It could be argued that the books are published to
support the credibility of the author in the tough marketplace of the consultant and
to sell consultancy services rather than to promote dissemination of any deeper
understanding of experiential approaches. In his review of the millennial consumer
504 JMM Journal of Marketing Management, Volume 25

Holbrook (2000) presented a critical and amusing review of some of the key
practitioner books on experience marketing. Some years later (Holbrook 2006b,
2007a, b and c), demonstrating remarkable dedication and tenacity (and displaying
evidence of a high boredom threshold), he builds on the earlier paper and presents
ten entertaining and critical book reviews in four successive editions of the Journal of
Macromarketing for what he describes as “recent entries in the management-oriented
experiential self-help sweepstakes” (Holbrook 2006b, p. 260). With a couple of
notable exceptions (including a volume by our own Professor Stephen Brown 2003),
Holbrook assesses the authors as being “blithely oblivious” to the long tradition of
the experiential perspective and offering “nary a reference to earlier studies” or “the
history of thought upon which they so industriously build” (2006b, p. 260). With the
enthusiasm of the inventor and the convert, the authors offer a wealth of examples
and anecdotal evidence and frequently illustrate what Holbrook cynically describes as
a “Seven Steps to Heaven” programme. However, the lack of conceptual foundations
and the reluctance to paint the whole picture for reasons of commercial sensitivity
merely serve to titillate interest and offer only a shallow and partial understanding
in this area.
Customer experiences can educate, entertain, and provide an opportunity to display
some particular knowledge, values or behaviour socially, or offer an escapist, visual or
aesthetic encounter (Pine and Gilmore 1998; Holbrook 2000). Firms provide these
experiences (Pine and Gilmore 1998; Schmitt 1999a; Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004)
in which customers can participate actively or passively and connect either by being
absorbed or immersed, perhaps better explained as more distant spectating versus
more active participating. According to Prahalad (2004) value is not added to goods,
or created by services, but is embedded in the actual personalised experiences created
through active participation. Guidance for creating marketing experiences from Pine
and Gilmore (1998) includes the steps of developing a coherent theme around which
to stage the experience, building positive and consistent impressions in the customer’s
mind (while eliminating any negative and inconsistent impressions), tangibilising the
experience with memorabilia, and engaging all five senses in creating a memorable
event. Thus the experience is planned, communicated, staged and delivered to the
customer. In a remarkably similar vein, Schmitt (2003b) offers a customer experience
management framework as a five step programme involving analysing the customer’s
world, building a dynamic, multisensory, multidimensional experiential platform,
designing a brand experience, structuring the customer interface, addressing all
touch points between the customer and company, and innovating continuously. This
can be seen as a development of Pine and Gilmore’s processual approach to creating
and delivering an experience to a largely passive consumer, but one grounded on
explicit knowledge of the customer’s world, and one which recognises customers’
expectation of novelty and newness. Schmitt (2003a) asserts that experience
marketing can deliver sensory, emotional, cognitive, behavioural and relational value
to customers, to which social and informational based value can be added. To be
successful, Poulsson and Kale (2004) argue that a marketing experience should have
personal relevance for the customer, be novel, offer an element of surprise, engender
learning and engage the customer.
The need for differentiation which drives much of experience marketing and the
requirement to facilitate a dialogue between customers, the firm and its network
members and the brand, together with the need to build strong and positive
impressions to communicate the experience to customers, all point to the centrality
of branding in the experience process. Recently practitioners have recognised the
 Tynan and McKechnie Experience marketing: a review and reassessment 505

suitability of web-based interactive media for staging experiences (Jack Morton

Worldwide 2007). Thus the virtual world’s mediated experiences stand alongside the
real world’s lived experiences as part of experience marketing for consumers who are
“informed, networked, empowered and active” (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004, p.
5). The facilitation of interaction and thus the creation of bonds between firms, their
brands, customers and fellow customers via the Internet have enabled the formation
of brand communities (Kozinets 1999). These online brand based communities
“create value for all their stakeholders, including the host, members, and any third
parties, such as advertisers” (Farquhar and Rowley 2006, p. 165) through dialogue
and relationships which themselves create value for both the firm and customers
(Szmigin, Canning and Reppel 2005).
The practitioner perspective tends to focus on the experience itself and
overemphasise physical aspects of the good, or more usually, the service, that is being
marketed. Until recently this has led to a concentration on bricks to the neglect of
clicks. It also means that marketing practitioners have been inclined to overlook other
occasions beyond the experience itself which constitute opportunities to offer value,
that is, at the pre-purchase and post-purchase stages. Furthermore their tendency
to consider value sources from a historical perspective results in an unreasonable
emphasis being placed on cognitive and relational value sources while eschewing the
opportunities which the other sources of value have to offer.

CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE ACADEMY

Experience marketing was conceived in the mid 1980s according to Gentile et al.
(2007). The practitioners Carbone and Haeckel (www.expeng.com) claim to have
launched the experience movement in the late 1980s and to have published the seminal
article in 1994, but this was predated and enabled by Holbrook and Hirschman’s
(1982) iconic paper on the consumption experience. Holbrook himself confessed to
thinking he and his co-author Elizabeth Hirschman “had pretty much discovered the
concept” of the consumption experience but subsequently acknowledged that Wroe
Alderson had emphasised its importance in his influential marketing text in 1957
(2006, p. 259), while noting that others traced the concept back via the work of the
economists Keynes and Marshall to Adam Smith in the eighteenth century (Holbrook
2006a).
Holbrook and Hirschman’s pioneering works addressed “those facets of consumer
behaviour that relate to the multi-sensory, fantasy, and emotive aspects of product use”
(Hirschman and Holbrook 1982, p. 99) and offered a number of new understandings
which marked a departure from the traditional information processing approach to
consumer behaviour (Pham 1998). These subjectively-based “experiential” aspects of
the consumption experience, were succinctly described as fantasies, feelings and fun
or the “three Fs” (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982), and more recently extended to
include the “four Es” of experience, entertainment, exhibitionism and evangelising
(Holbrook 2000, p. 178). Their work highlighted a number of significant points.
Firstly they identified the need to examine the whole consumption experience from
pre-purchase through to disposal and or outcomes. Secondly, that emotion is a crucial
aspect of consumption, an issue which has subsequently attracted a burgeoning level of
interest (see for example, Winsted 2000; Bagozzi, Gopinath and Nyer 1999; Richins
1997). In her study of emotions in the consumption experience Richins (1997)
showed that emotions are context-specific and may differ in character from those
506 JMM Journal of Marketing Management, Volume 25

experienced in other contexts, and so any investigation of consumption meanings

embedded in experience ought to be context-specific. Holbrook and Hirschman
(1982) also noted that individuals not only receive experiences in a multisensory
mode but they also respond to and react to them, and therefore put interaction at the
heart of the experience. Finally, consumers can not only evoke the past in response to
the experience but they can also respond by imagining what they have never actually
experienced (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982); so imagination and nostalgia may
also have roles to play in any consumption experience.
The seminal work of Hirschman and Holbrook (1982) addressing subjectively-
based experiential aspects of the consumption experience, stimulated recognition
of the need for a deeper understanding of consumer behaviour through examining
the overall consumption experience. Hirschman (1984) later identified three
consumption motives including cognition seeking, that is the experience sought to
stimulate thought processes, sensation seeking or the experience sought to stimulate
the senses and finally the novelty seeking experience or desire to seek out novel
stimuli. To these, Holbrook and Schindler’s (2003) work on the role of nostalgia
in the consumption experience adds the hedonic social behaviour of reminiscing.
Whereas Poulsson and Kale (2004) identified a successful experience as one which
will engage the consumer and have personal relevance for them, offer novelty and
surprise while producing learning, other sources of value from the experience can
be derived from the full gamut of emotions and feelings it generates, including
“love, hate, fear, joy, boredom, anxiety, pride, anger, disgust, sadness, sympathy, lust,
ecstasy, greed, guilt, elation, shame, and awe” (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982, p.
137). Many consumption experiences are shared rather than individual in nature.
Value can be created for the consumer through interaction with other people, such as
with friends or family members through a collective consumption experience (Tynan
and McKechnie 2009; McKechnie and Tynan 2008; Gainer 1995). In a similar vein,
Fournier (1998) identified the value customers derived from their experiences with
particular brands they were strongly involved with. Therefore, social and relational
sources of value can be obtained through consumption experiences with other people
and of valued objects like brands. Maclaran and Brown (2005) identified co-created
utopian value with respect to the notions of place and space in their empirical study
of a festival shopping mall, identifying “utopia” as an activity, a trajectory, a process
that is socially and historically constructed rather than simply being a place. Finally
there is also utilitarian value, which is derived from the perceived usefulness of an
experience in terms of its ability to perform functional tasks and the value derived
from its functional or physical attributes (Arnould, Price and Zinkhan 2004).
It is clear that the essence of experience marketing has a long history within
the specific services marketing fields of retailing (Pine and Gilmore 2004, 1998;
Gilmore and Pine 2002a; Kozinets et al. 2002; Puccinelli et al. 2009; Verhoef et al.
2009), tourism (Leighton 2007a), entertainment and the arts (Holbrook et al. 1984;
Pine and Gilmore 1998; Petkus 2004), and hospitality (Gilmore and Pine 2002b,
1997; Munoz, Wood and Solomon 2006). The service marketing notions which
have informed experience marketing include the understanding of service delivery as
drama with a performance, which takes place at the point of consumption, within a
particular servicescape, as the result of a scripted interaction between customer and
employee (Grove and Fisk 1997).
The next section deals with the new ideas of Service-Dominant logic which takes
some of these ideas further by emphasising experiences and the co-creation of value
between firms and their customers.
 Tynan and McKechnie Experience marketing: a review and reassessment 507

SERVICE-DOMINANT LOGIC

Vargo and Lusch (2004) made a seminal contribution to marketing when they
postulated the concept of Service-Dominant logic (S-D logic) which has generated
a far-reaching movement in our understanding of marketing. S-D logic offers “a
marketing-grounded understanding of value and exchange” (Lusch and Vargo 2006b,
p. 281) through changing the focus of marketing from “tangible goods and activities
associated with their delivery” to a focus on service (singular) as the process of
doing something for someone (Lusch and Vargo 2006b, p. 282). The authors of
S-D logic claim not to own it but treat it as “open source” (Vargo and Lusch 2008)
thereby encouraging many academics to engage with their ideas variously debating,
reinforcing, refining, extending and challenging S-D logic (Lusch and Vargo 2006a).
The essentials of S-D logic are shown in Table 1 below. Traditionally, according to
Goods-Dominant logic, value was created within the business and delivered to the
customer and so value in exchange was paramount and value in use neglected. By
contrast, S-D logic emphasises service as the common core component in marketing
and brings with it new marketing grounded understandings of marketing where
value is created through participation in a value creation network. Thus S-D logic
emphasises the role of customers in the co-creation of value (Baron and Harris 2008)
throughout the design, production, delivery and consumption processes (Payne et
al. 2008) as they exchange knowledge, skills, processes and core competences with
suppliers and other partners. One of the foundational premises of S-D logic, which
proposes that the consumer is always a collaborator, brings with it two assumptions:
firstly that the value is determined by the user during the consumption process and
not just at the point of exchange, and secondly that the customer participates in the
creation of the core offering thereby becoming a co-producer (Lusch, Vargo and
O’Brien 2007). The customer “uniquely and phenomenologically” (Vargo and Lusch
2008, p. 7) determines value during the whole life of the offering, which may be an
extended period of time, so co-creation is both inherently relational and strongly
linked to value in use. Additionally, the value creating interactions are not limited

TABLE 1 Conceptual transitions

Goods-Dominant logic Transitional concepts Service-Dominant logic

concepts concepts
Goods Services Service
Products Offerings Experiences
Feature/attribute Benefit Solution
Value-added Co-production Co-creation of value
Profit maximisation Financial engineering Financial feedback/learning
Price Value delivery Value proposition
Equilibrium systems Dynamic systems Complex adaptive systems
Supply chain Value-chain Value-creation network/
constellation
Promotion Integrated marketing Dialogue
communications
To market Market to Market with
Product orientation Market orientation Service orientation
Source: Lusch and Vargo (2006b, p. 286).
508 JMM Journal of Marketing Management, Volume 25

to the customer and supplier but can include members of their networks e.g. fellow
customers, shareholders, external experts and opinion leaders, partners within the
supply chain and other stakeholders such as the media, customers and members of
brand communities. From the supplier’s point of view this brings with it the need to
engage in a dialogue with customers and members of the network, the offering of a
total value proposition, an orientation to resource integration, and the necessity to
engage in a process of learning to offer solutions which are achieved by jointly and
flexibly working with customers (Vargo and Morgan 2005) which can be facilitated
by information and communication technology (Baron and Harris 2008).
The emergence of S-D logic offers an opportunity to bring together practitioner
and academic thinking on experience marketing. It is important to the study of
experience marketing as it concentrates on value creation which is achieved through
the application of skills and knowledge, is facilitated through interaction, is predicated
upon co-creation, accepts the requirement for customer participation, is determined
by the customer, affirms the concept of value in use over that of value in exchange
and thus addresses many of the key features of experience marketing (Tynan and
McKechnie 2008). It should be noted that both concepts also stress the gestalt or
totality of providing for customer’s needs and wants.

DISCUSSION

Bringing these literatures together and reviewing them raises a number of issues
of relevance to both practitioners and academics. Applying S-D logic brings with
it a change in emphasis from the traditional perspective on managing resources
and capabilities to managing the customer experience. To achieve this requires a
fundamental change in perspective from that of producers producing and consumers
consuming to one where producers and consumers both produce and consume, thus
requiring a long-term strategy which includes a shared vision, mutually negotiated
experiences and constant collaboration.
The driver behind this is a new approach to mutual value creation, or co-creation,
through the exchange of knowledge, skills and expertise. To achieve this, it is
important to take a holistic view of the consumption experience from the customer’s
perspective. Consuming an experience can be viewed as a process that takes place
across stages including pre-consumption, the purchase and core experiences, to the
remembered consumption experience (Arnould et al. 2004). The value created is
both enabled and judged by customers throughout this consumption process (see
Figure 1) and not merely at the point of exchange.
Much of the practitioner literature concentrates on a limited range of value
sources, but both the consumer behaviour literature and S-D logic offer additional
sources of value which should be taken into account. In the pre-experience stage

FIGURE 1 The customer’s holistic experience

PRE- CUSTOMER POST-

EXPERIENCE EXPERIENCE EXPERIENCE
 Tynan and McKechnie Experience marketing: a review and reassessment 509

customers anticipate and prepare for consumption by searching for information,

imagining how the experience might be, planning and budgeting for the experience
(Arnould et al. 2004), whereas at the customer experience and post-experience
stages customers obtain value from both engaging in the experience and from the
consumption meanings they co-create (Peñaloza and Venkatesh 2006). In Figure 2
below, the activities the customer engages in throughout the whole experience, the
multiple possible sources of customer value and meaning embedded in the experience
and the outcomes the customer can experience are detailed.
Customers obtain value from sensory meaning through sight, sound, touch, taste
and smell associated with the experience (Schmitt 1999a and b), while emotional
meaning extends far beyond liking and disliking to incorporate the whole range
of emotions attached to the consumption experience (Richins 1997). Rational
economic consumer choices are driven by utilitarian meaning where customers seek
out functional value (Arnould et al. 2004). In more recent papers, Vargo and Lusch
(2008) and Lusch et al. (2007) emphasised the importance of value achieved through
relational aspects of the experience but it is important to note that this encompasses a
number of relationships which are not fully described in their work. The relationship
can be social in nature and be with other individuals or groups (Tynan and McKechnie
2009; McKechnie and Tynan 2008; Gainer 1995) and also with inanimate objects
like the brand (Fournier 1998) or the firm (See Figure 3 overleaf). In the Internet age
customers also obtain informational value via traditional and online media (Kozinets
1999). Furthermore customers can acquire value through the consumption of novel
experiences (Poulsson and Kale 2004) and from utopian meanings with respect to the
consumer’s relations with place and space (Maclaran and Brown 2005).
Following the experience there are a number of outcomes from the consumer’s
perspective. A successful experience will have entertained (Holbrook 2000) and
generated enjoyment. Customers may also have learned (Poulsson and Kale 2004) and
developed new skills. They may experience nostalgia for the experience and engage
in the behaviour of nostalgic reminiscing when reliving it (Holbrook and Schindler
2003). Consumers can engage in fantasising about how the experience could have
been (or so nearly was) given more knowledge, other contexts or even other co-
consumers to share it with. Fantasising allows consumers to go beyond things they
have actually experienced and even experience things as their ideal selves. Consumers

FIGURE 2 The customer’s experience – activities, value sources and outcomes

PRE-EXPERIENCE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE POST-EXPERIENCE

Activities Value Sources Outcomes

Sensory Enjoyment
Imagining Emotional Entertainment
Searching Functional/utilitarian Learning
Planning Relational Skills
Budgeting Social Nostalgia
Informational Fantasising
Novelty Evangelising
Utopian

TIME

Source: Adapted from Tynan and McKechnie (2008)

510 JMM Journal of Marketing Management, Volume 25

also evangelise (Holbrook 2000) for an exceptional experience to persuade others to

engage with it.
An essential prerequisite for this to take place is the establishment of a meaningful
dialogue between partners in the network. The interactivity necessary to co-create
value requires dialogue and not simple one way communication to develop an
understanding of the customer’s evolving needs. The dialogue must begin in the
pre-experience stage to listen, get the customer involved, to suggest an offer and to
support imagining, searching and planning activities. It must continue through to the
post-experience stage to reinforce the positive outcomes.
Co-creation brings with it the necessity of sharing sensitive information and that of
engaging in joint problem solving. Therefore, co-creating value involves risk taking
(Lusch et al. 2007), which is predicated upon high levels of trust. Allied to this,
experiences require interaction, whether electronically mediated or not, and thus are
personal in nature and present an ongoing risk to the privacy of all parties involved.
Finally, the change from a focus on value in exchange to value in use under S-D logic
makes it important to remember the temporal aspects of experience consumption:
interaction with the customer can be extended over time, involve large numbers of
touch-points, require substantial amounts of interaction with many parties in the
network and brand community, and consequently, be complex and expensive to
orchestrate. Using knowledge of the customers’ needs to make the appropriate value
proposition over the entire duration of the experience requires flexibility, innovation
and learning.
The network of partners must be included in any evaluation to fully consider the
nature of value due to relational and social sources. According to S-D logic, value is
co-created through interaction with customers, fellow customers, external experts
and opinion leaders, brand communities, stakeholders, and others in the network.
The interactions between the customer, other involved customers, the firm and its
brand and employees and the opinion leaders who influence them are shown in Figure
3. Therefore the Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) strategy must address
all the members of the network, harmonise both on and offline communications

FIGURE 3 Experience interactions

Customer
A

Customer
B

FOCAL
CUSTOMER
X Brand

Customer
C
Employees
Firm

Expert/Opinion
Leader
 Tynan and McKechnie Experience marketing: a review and reassessment 511

and tackle both formal and informal communications as according to Peñaloza and
Venkatesh (2006) consumers and marketers are social beings inhabiting communities
(Vargo, Maglio and Akaka 2008).

MANAGERIAL RECOMMENDATIONS

In recognising that experiences are not simply staged for the customer but co-created
with active customers and others in their network, the marketing practitioner must be
flexible and respond to customer needs or lead their requirements in some way while
recognising that the customer is the final and only arbiter of value. The practitioner
must conceive sources of value that their customers may value in the widest possible
terms, and make a value proposition based on offering some combination of sensory,
emotional, functional/utilitarian, relational, social, informational and utopian value,
while being aware that variety is also a source of value. The customer envisions
the outcomes of enjoyment, entertainment, learning, skills acquisition, nostalgia,
fantasising or evangelising and so anything the practitioner can do to facilitate,
reinforce or enhance these sources of value in use is beneficial.
It is important to manage the marketing experience through its whole lifespan
including the pre- and post-experience stages. To achieve this requires an in-depth
knowledge of consumers, their consumption values and willingness/ability to
participate in the co-creation process. It also calls for extending the remit of the
practitioner into areas previously considered to be the exclusive domain of the
consumer, so that a more strategic and comprehensive approach to experience
marketing can be implemented.
From the customer’s perspective, co-creating value involves risk taking as
information is shared, and is accompanied by an ongoing risk to the privacy of all
parties concerned. To respond to this, successful marketers will need to exhibit
evidence of being trustworthy by offering meaningful guarantees, being honest,
reliable, and open in their dealings and demonstrating commitment throughout the
entire consumption process, particularly at the post-experience stage.
Value is co-created with members of the whole network including suppliers,
shareholders, external experts and opinion leaders, partners within the supply
chain and other stakeholders such as the media, customers and members of brand
communities and so these “relevant others” must be identified, their part in value
creation understood and a way to achieving meaningful dialogue with them established.
A fuller understanding of dialogue requires an emphasis on communication via
multiple media (both traditional and digital) which is coherent and coordinated,
and represents a seamless transition to fully integrated marketing communications
(IMC). Marketers are unlikely to be able to control this entire range of media, for
example appearances of their brand on social networking sites or YouTube, but need
to monitor and respond quickly to any challenges to their offer.

CONCLUSION AND RESEARCH AGENDA

In conclusion, practitioner-based understandings of experience marketing need to

be considerably revised when incorporating the ideas from the academic literature,
particularly addressing consumption behaviour and S-D logic. This approach requires
working with customers and members of an extended value creation network as
512 JMM Journal of Marketing Management, Volume 25

partners, over a long time to co-create complex value sources and not merely deliver
an offer to them. Co-creating value with the customer requires high levels of trust,
risk sharing and joint decision making; experience marketing under S-D logic requires
a totally different approach in terms of working with the customer as partner to
configure the offer including an extended range of value from sensory, emotional,
functional/utilitarian, relational, social, informational, novelty and utopian sources,
communicating and developing that offer, co-creating the negotiated experience, and
understanding and evaluating the experience post-purchase.
While there has been considerable academic work on experience marketing it is
almost exclusively theoretically based. The contribution of this work and its relevance
to practitioners could be considerably enhanced by increasing the volume of empirical
research underpinning the academic contribution. Conducting empirical work in this
area, offers an opportunity to apply new understandings and approaches that are
experiential in both the real and virtual worlds which are interactive, progressive,
evolving and flexible in nature. Such development is highly recommended for it will
further embed and facilitate the evolution of this useful construct for both academics
and practitioners.
From this overview it is clear that there has been a bifurcation of practitioner and
academic work on experience marketing. However it would appear that the new
dominant paradigm of S-D logic holds the key towards helping to bring these streams
together. We therefore propose the following:

1 That marketing academics are encouraged to engage in knowledge transfer

by talking to marketing practitioners about the new understandings of the
importance of customer experiences from a processual view, and investigate
problems encountered when creating experiences in practice.
2 That the level of awareness of S-D logic within the academic and practitioner
marketing communities be raised, particularly highlighting its key tenets and
demonstrating how it can add value to managerial decision-making.
3 Finally that empirical research into the holistic consumption experience, and
value creation processes in the value producing networks, be conducted, adopting
ethnographic approaches (Healy et al. 2007) and naturalistic enquiry (Belk, Sherry
and Wallendorf 1988), to fully understand the complex interactions in the actual
contexts in which they occur.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The authors would like to thank Dr. M. Teresa Pereira Heath, University of Minho,
for her insightful and constructive comments on an earlier draft of the paper.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS AND CORRESPONDENCE

Caroline Tynan is Professor of Marketing at Nottingham University Business School,

Vice President of the Academy of Marketing, Dean of the Academic Senate of the
Chartered Institute of Marketing, a Trustee and Fellow of the CIM, Chartered Marketer,
Member of the ESRC Research College, and a Visiting Professor of Marketing at The
University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. She also served on the Business and Management
Studies subpanel for the Research Assessment Exercise 2008 to represent marketing.
Caroline is a member of the editorial boards of the European Journal of Marketing,
Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Consumer Behaviour and Qualitative
Market Research: An International Journal. She has published in a number of journals
including the Journal of Business Research, European Journal of Marketing, Journal
of Marketing Management and Journal of Strategic Marketing. Her research interests
include relationship marketing particularly within business-to-consumer and cross-
cultural contexts, consumption meanings and managerial marketing practice.
Corresponding author: Professor Caroline Tynan, Nottingham University Business
School, Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham NG8 1BB, UK.
T +44 115 846 6978
F +44 115 846 6667
E caroline.tynan@nottingham.ac.uk

Sally McKechnie is Associate Professor in Marketing at Nottingham University

Business School, Member of the Academy of Marketing, and Member of the
Chartered Institute of Marketing. Prior to returning to academia she held marketing
positions in the exhibitions and direct marketing industries. She also held a teaching
company associateship at the University of Strathclyde. She is a member of the
editorial board of the Journal of Customer Behaviour and has published in a number
of journals including the European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing
Management, Journal of Product and Brand Management, International Journal of
Retail Distribution and Management, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, International
Journal of Advertising and Journal of Customer Behaviour. Her research interests
 Tynan and McKechnie Experience marketing: a review and reassessment 517

continue to be in the areas of customer behaviour and marketing communications,

with a particular interest in consumption and policy issues
Sally McKechnie, Associate Professor, Nottingham University Business School,
Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham NG8 1BB, UK.
T +44 115 951 5491
F +44 115 846 6667
E sally.mckechnie@nottingham.ac.uk