Study on the relationship of experiential marketing and customer age: The case of IKEA in China

Abstract

Currently, the experience economy, as a new form of economy is developing and following the service economy. The experiential marketing is the product of experience economy and it is increasingly used by more and more enterprises. A good way of carrying out experiential marketing improves consumers’ user experience when they do shopping. Nevertheless, there are some issues regarding the existing marketing strategy that need to be looked into. The purpose of this thesis is to try to find out Chinese consumers’ attitudes towards experiential marketing. IKEA, a Swedish furniture retailer, has a large number of stores in China and IKEA is widely known for its experiential marketing. It seems appropriate for a case study on the Chinese consumers’ attitudes toward experiential marketing. The case study method has been chosen for doing this research, and the research is conducted from a consumers’ perspective. This thesis first introduces the background of this kind of marketing strategy and explains the basic theory of it and then, analyzed according to IKEA’s actual situation of implementing experiential marketing. How IKEA applies experiential marketing mode and makes full use of its characteristics is studied, especially from Chinese consumers’ perspective. The analysis is based on Chinese consumers who belong to different age groups.