Marketing orientation in emerging economies with special reference to experiential marketing in food retailing outlets

Abstract

Marketing has been defined as the science and art of exploring, creating and delivering value to satisfy the unfulfilled needs and desires of target customers at a profit (Kotler 1997). Over the years, it has undergone various stages of orientations, namely production orientation (1900-1920), product orientation (1921-1930), sales orientation (1931-1960), marketing orientation (1961-1970) and customer orientation (1971-till date) (Kaur and Sharma 2009). During customer orientation period, four types of marketing orientations have evolved for satisfying and engaging the customers, namely market orientation, relationship marketing orientation, service marketing orientation and experiential marketing orientation. Towards gaining an understanding of the marketing orientation in the emerging economies, one of the current orientations like experiential marketing has been taken up for the present study, with an effort to assess its level of application in an emerging economy, like India. newlineExperiential marketing is usually undertaken by practitioners and academicians to achieve customer satisfaction as a result of the fourth offering which is and#8213;experiencesand#8214;, wherein the first is product, second is quality, third is services and fourth is experiences. It aims to retain customers so as to achieve long-run profitability of the business (Pine and Gilmore 1999). Marketing tries to offer experiences that are pleasurable and memorable, allowing the customers to exploit all their senses through the staging of products and services (Schmitt1999). newline