Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jretconser Brand experience and consumers’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) a price premium: Mediating role of brand credibility and perceived uniqueness Abhishek Dwivedi a, ⁎ , Tahmid Nayeem a , Feisal Murshed b a School of Management and Marketing, Charles Sturt University, Australia b Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Brand experience Brand credibility Experiential marketing Perceived uniqueness Willingness-to-pay price premium ABSTRACT How brand experience can be leveraged to enhance profitability is attracting growing interest from both practitioners and academics. This study develops and empirically validates a conceptual model that investigates how brand experience may influence consumers’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) a price premium, as mediated by brand credibility and perceived uniqueness. Based on data collected from 405 new automobile buyers, analysis reveals that brand experience affects consumers’ WTP a price premium directly as well as indirectly through brand credibility and perceived uniqueness. This research contributes in the domains of experiential marketing, brand management, and pricing strategy and offers actionable insights for managerial practice. 1. Introduction The marketing domain is progressing toward a relational mindset that involves emphasizing experiential characteristics of a product aimed at creating more direct and meaningful experiences with con- sumers (Ebrahim et al., 2016; Nysveen et al., 2013). We are beginning to understand that consumption of brand is a complex (multi-faceted) phenomenon that can manifest through sensory, cognitive and beha- vioral experiences for consumers (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; Hultén, 2011; Tynan et al., 2014). As a result, brand experience, con- ceptualized as consumer sensations, feelings, cognitions, and beha- vioral responses evoked by brand-related stimuli (Brakus et al., 2009) has emerged as a novel construct. The rapidly increasing brand ex- perience scholarship highlights its role in influencing critical consumer level outcomes such as loyalty (Ding and Tseng, 2015), repurchase in- tention (Ebrahim et al., 2016), satisfaction (Brakus et al., 2009; Nysveen et al., 2013), and positive word of mouth (Ngo et al., 2016). With the cost of creating a better brand experience often being disproportionately high, the question arises if such investment can in- crease the potential for consumers to pay higher price which is directly tied to firm profits. While there is a general recognition that strong brand associations can command higher price (e.g., Dewar, 2004), di- rect linkage between brand experience and consumers’ willingness-to- pay (WTP) a price premium remains understudied. The main goal of this article is to fill this research gap. While examining this intriguing relationship represents an important contribution on its own, con- sumers’ WTP a price premium represents a critical indicator of brand value and competitive advantage (Aaker, 1996). Furthermore, our theoretical underpinning focuses on consumer-perceived credibility- and uniqueness-based pathways, through which the effect of brand experience materializes. That is, we propose that brand experience af- fects consumers’ WTP a price premium both directly and indirectly through brand credibility and perceived uniqueness. To accomplish this investigation, we use data from a survey of automobile consumers. Our study proffers several key contributions. First, to our knowl- edge, the present study is the first to focus on the value relevance of brand experience by linking that to consumers’ WTP a price premium which subsequently leads to higher profit. From a theoretical stand- point, this research not only adds depth to nuanced understanding of experiential marketing (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; Schmitt, 1999), but also expands the literature by showing an important downstream consequence of brand experience (Brakus et al., 2009; Francisco-Maffezzolli et al., 2014). Second, the current research theo- retically delineates and empirically assesses how brand credibility and perceived uniqueness mediate brand experience’s positive impact on consumers’ WTP a price premium. By doing so, this study explicates heretofore unexamined pathways through which brand experience may shape consumers’ WTP a price premium. Third, we broaden the no- mological network of brand experience. Most notably, we document consumers’ WTP a price premium as an outcome of consumer brand experience. Thus, this research fits into the literature on the drivers of consumers’ WTP a price premium, which is considered as a vital com- ponent of brand equity (Aaker, 1996; Netemeyer et al., 2004). Our contribution lies in shedding considerable light on factors that may https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2018.06.009 Received 22 March 2018; Received in revised form 6 June 2018; Accepted 15 June 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: adwivedi@csu.edu.au (A. Dwivedi), tnayeem@csu.edu.au (T. Nayeem), murshed@kutztown.edu (F. Murshed). Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services 44 (2018) 100–107 0969-6989/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T