A Study On Experiential Marketing Strategies Of China Time-honored Catering Brands From Cultural Perspective

With the arrival of the Experience Economy,"experience"has gradually become the key factor in promoting the economic and social development. Meanwhile, people's living patterns, consumption concepts and demands changed a lot. The traditional marketing model which focused on product features and service benefits can not effectively meet the growing personalized and emotional demands of consumers. In this case, the key for catering businesses to survive and develop in the fierce market competition is to take the changes of consumers'needs into consideration and make corresponding adjustments to such changes. The adoption of experiential marketing is just the adaption to the changes of consumers'needs.The catering industry itself is an industry full of abundant catering experience which is suitable for developing experience. In addition, the time-honored catering brands not only share the general features of the common catering brands, but also possess the unique historical background and cultural connotation which can be further explored through experience. However, a large number of catering brands once to be glorious are now fading away from the market for the reasons that they neither effectively give their own advantages into full play nor adapt to the new changes of market environment. When faced with the fierce marketing competition and the diverse changes of consumers'needs, the way for time-honored catering brands to survive and sustainably develop is to make marketing innovation through experiential marketing and to enhance the value of time-honored catering brands through providing unique catering and cultural experience to their consumers.This thesis combines qualitative research with quantitative research. Qualitative research is made to review the experiential marketing theory and consumer behavior theory on the basis of the collection and classification of relevant literatures, and then lay a theoretical foundation on the further empirical study. Quantitative research is made to understand customer experience and find the existing problems in China Time-honored Catering Brands through questionnaire survey. The survey shows, in the Experience Economy era, consumers'catering consumption in China Time-honored Catering Brands has the following characteristics: in consumption needs and buying motivation, consumers pay more attention to the pursuit of higher level needs such as social contact and self-actualization; in buying decision-making, irrational economic factors are preferred; consumers'individual characteristics also influence their catering experience: women have more demanding requests on the quality of catering consumption than men; the younger the consumers, the higher education they achieve and the higher income they earn, the higher their demands on food, environment and service. At last, based on the theoretical foundation and the analysis of results from the questionnaire, a set of experiential marketing strategies in the aspects of product, environment, service and communication are put forward to promote the sustainable development of China Time-honored Catering Brands.