Exploring visitor experiences at trade shows Diego Rinallo, Stefania Borghini and Francesca Golfetto Management Department and CERMES – Centre for Research on Markets and the Industrial Sector, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate business visitor behaviour at trade shows and to propose a complementary view based on the experiential perspective in marketing. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reports an ethnographic study conducted in the context of ten international trade shows in the textile- apparel industry in Europe. Findings – The study sheds light on the nature of the experience provided by trade show exhibitors and organisers and on visitors’ lived experiences. Trade shows immerse industrial buyers in a physical and cognitive experience that requires their active participation. Under such circumstances, industrial marketers who employ experiential marketing techniques are likely to increase their trade show performances. Originality/value – The paper adopts a new perspective that sees business visitor behaviour from an experiential standpoint and discusses the managerial implications that highlight the interplay of exhibitors and trade show organisers in designing and setting valuable experiences for visitors. Keywords Trade fairs, Marketing, Consumer behaviour, Ethnography Paper type Research paper Introduction In consumer goods markets, many companies have recently adopted marketing practices centred on a more holistic view of consumers and their relationships with brands based on an emotional rather than a rational approach to consumption and marketing stimuli. This new approach, which puts consumer experiences at the centre of marketing practices, gained momentum at the end of the 1990s thanks to the publication of some best-selling management books (Pine and Gilmore, 1999; Schmitt, 1999). Specifically, the perspective considers experiences as a new category of supply – as different from services as services are different from goods (Pine and Gilmore, 1998, 1999; Gilmore and Pine, 2002). Proponents suggest that by creating memorable and complex customer experiences comprising different but inter-related elements (e.g. cognitive as well as emotional, behavioural as well as relational), marketers can obtain a competitive advantage over rival firms (Schmitt, 1999; Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004). Moreover, by monitoring and managing these experiences, customer satisfaction may be increased considerably (Berry et al., 2002). In our view, the conceptual models and methods developed in the literature on experiential marketing can also be applied to managing visitor experiences at trade shows, even if the approach has so far received scant application in business markets. To support our main points, in this paper we report the results of an exploratory study of visitor behaviour in a sample of textile-apparel trade shows. Our findings support the view that the monitoring of visitor experiences enables both exhibitors to manage their trade show participation more effectively and organisers to design more attractive events. Theoretical framework Consumer experience and experiential marketing Traditional approaches to marketing have been sustained by a view of customers as rational individuals who process advertising and other marketing stimuli as information. In more recent times, however, many firms operating in consumer goods markets have started to adopt marketing strategies based on the premise that cognitive processes are just a part of the picture when speaking of consumers and their relationships with brands. The first academic proponents of the experiential perspective argued that, at least in certain contexts (e.g. hedonic products such as novels, plays and sports), consumer actions may be motivated by “fantasy, feelings and fun” and not only rationality (Holbrook and Hirschmann, 1982). Over the years, other contributions have shown that consumers do actively search for the emotional, sensorial and relational aspects of consumption goods and activities, as these aspects are intrinsically gratifying and contribute to constructing individual and collective identity (e.g. Holt, 1995; Thompson and Hirschman, 1995; Murray, 2002; Schau and Gilly, 2003; Arnould and Thompson, 2005). Other scholars have identified the different elements that create experiences, including sensorial stimuli and, most importantly, meaningful social bonds with other consumers. Shared consumption experiences enable the creation of several typologies of community of consumers, variously labelled as consumer tribes (Cova and Cova, 2002; Cova et al., 2007), subcultures of consumption (Celsi et al., 1993; Schouten and McAlexander, 1995), and brand communities (Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001). The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0885-8624.htm Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing 25/4 (2010) 249–258 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 0885-8624] [DOI 10.1108/08858621011038207] Received: 22 October 2007 Revised: 9 April 2008 Accepted: 10 October 2008 249