The age of culture is upon us. As the term "global village" implies, information propagates throughout the world almost instantly. This speed and availability of information equalizes the quality of product or service and greatly changes the conscious...
The age of culture is upon us. As the term "global village" implies, information propagates throughout the world almost instantly. This speed and availability of information equalizes the quality of product or service and greatly changes the consciousness and purchasing pattern of consumers.
The customers with this new propensity do not only buy for the quality of a product, but also for its value. Therefore, the advertisements and the public relations campaigns are not very effective for influencing customers' mind. Accordingly, the marketing focuses on building the image strong enough to seize customers' heart, and the experience marketing that takes cultural factors into account is emerging. It is because the unique sensibility code of the culture makes the customers easily access companies and products and form strong images of them.
The objective of this research is to help small to medium size companies which have insufficient resources to grow as sustainable enterprises by utilizing the newly emerging experience marketing. Unlike advertisements or public relations campaign that are usually very expensive, experience marketing is a new marketing technique that costs less yet can be very effective. This research shows that small to medium size companies with limited resources can afford experience marketing and achieve good results.
Prior research on the experience marketing that takes cultural factors into account and on the photography industry led to the assumption that the experience marketing influences the customers' sensitivity to build favorable images of companies and their products, and that it also influences the management performance through better customer satisfaction. On this basis, we set the hypothesis that the events, images, and cultural factors in experience marketing will positively influence the management performance and competitiveness. This hypothesis is verified through the study on the managers of portrait studios.
As a result, we proved that experience marketing has positive effect on the management performance and competitiveness. We hope that this study will help more medium and small-sized companies with limited resources like the portrait studios to achieve better results through improved customer satisfaction by applying the experience marketing, and that more research in this area will follow in the future.