Marketing in postmodernity: Experiential marketing and imagineering

Offering only core products and services with no suplementary services are no longer enough to survive in today?s fierce competitive environment. It is argued that today?s businesses require something more effective and innovative than the traditional marketing methods and approaches such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It is now important for businesses to adopt Customer Experience Management (CEM). Recently, companies have been trying to enhance their competitive advantages through creating experiences for their customers. There is no doubt that experience creation helps companies strengthen customers? image perceptions of their products, hence to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. The need, therefore, is to create memorable, personal, and engaging experiences and to orchestrate all the touchpoints related to the experience in a consistent way. The aim of this research is to create awareness and enhance the comprehension of experiential marketing concept in Turkey. For this reason, a case study technique was executed, for which interviews were arranged with the managers of three businesses operating in the service sector in Izmir, Turkey to find out how these three businesses formulate, market, and offer their products according to the principles of experiential marketing. The findings of the research show that the companies do not apply any specific customer experience management schemes although they were found to utilize some principles and applications with no systematic planning or well-projected marketing decisions. After the analysis of the case studies, finally, a customer experience management framework called as Strategic Customer Experience Management Framework (SCEMF), is proposed to provide a guideline for practioners in experiential marketing. Keywords: Customer Experience Management, Experience, Experience Economy, Experiential Marketing, Imagineering, Service Sector.