Why the Experiential View Is Vital To Marketing Communications Research Now

MANAGEMENT SLANT

• The experiential view offers a more elaborate account of consumers’ incidental exposure to numerous communications and the effects of brand stimuli without awareness.

• It offers a more elaborate account of increasingly entertaining communications with less direct, factual, and verbal messages.

• It offers a more elaborate account of the increasingly active role that empowered consumers play.

• Expanding the traditional information-processing paradigm by bringing in the experiential view provides an enhanced framework for examining communications effectiveness.

• This enhanced framework requires a more holistic approach as well as more indirect measures such as implicit measures.

INTRODUCTION

Whereas advertising and marketing communications have changed a lot in terms of practice, scope, policy, and impact in the seven decades since the inauguration of the Journal of Advertising Research in 1960, the theoretical perspective seemingly has not. Even though the very definition of advertising has evolved through several updates since John E. Kennedy’s salesmanship in print in the early years of the nineteenth century to the more recent and broader “brand-initiated communication intent on impacting people” (Dahlen and Rosengren, 2016, p.334), which refers to the umbrella term “marketing communications” (e.g., Huh, 2016, Schultz, 2016, Stewart, 2016), the dominant theoretical perspective still dates back to the original view of advertising as sales information. For an excellent overview of the evolution of the definition of advertising, see, for instance, Richards and Curran (2002), as well as the first pages of Rotfeld (2008).

INCIDENTAL EXPOSURE AND EFFECTS OF BRAND COMMUNICATIONS PERCEIVED WITHOUT AWARENESS

Most, if not all, authors who have sought to analyze the evolution of advertising concluded that the development of information and communication technologies, new media, and new formats are driving forces (e.g., Dahlen and Rosengren, 2016; Kumar and Gupta, 2016). Advertising and marketing communications depend on the media to deliver their messages (Deuze, 2016). What is obvious is the combined development of the Internet and advances in computer technologies, as well as the multiple and varied digital communication formats they continuously generate. This can be seen easily in banner or display advertisements, websites, search advertisements, online behavioral advertising, videos, native advertising, video game placements, advergames (games that use advertising techniques to promote products or services), apps, and brand communications on social media that, in turn, cover a wide range of platforms from Facebook and Twitter to Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok (Dahlen and Rosengren, 2016).

As Rust and Oliver (1994) foresaw more than a quarter of a century ago, the new technologies that enable these developments have profoundly changed marketing communications, making them both ever more numerous and ubiquitous in content, time, and place. With the continued development of digital and mobile technologies, the proliferation of media platforms offers consumers multiple and varied content—all of which are potential communications media—that are accessible at virtually any time, in any situation, and at any location (Stewart and Cunningham, 2017). The emergence and development of social media have greatly amplified the power and the phenomenon of word-of-mouth communication, which has exponentially increased the number of potential customer touchpoints for marketing communications (Batra and Keller, 2016).

Obviously, the number of communications related to a brand or organization to which a consumer can be exposed on a daily basis is astronomical (Batra and Keller, 2016; Wind and Hays, 2016). It is apparent that this multiplication of new media and platforms, which offers consumers multiple and varied content at all times and places, reflects a consumer in permanent search of sensations, emotions, and pleasure. Huizinga (1970) discussed the idea of homo ludens, or the “man who plays,” in opposition to homo economicus, or “economic man,” and its instrumental consumption of the late 1950s (Havlena and Holbrook, 1986), which fully matches a postmodern (Firat, Dholakia, and Venkatesh, 1995; Lyotard, 1979) or even hypermodern consumer (Aubert, 2006; Lipovetsky and Charles, 2004).

Faced with this multiplication of new media, platforms, and various digital formats of communications, consumers are exposed more than ever to brand communications during their multiple media consumption and entertainment activities, particularly as they are often engaged in media multitasking and multiscreening (Duff and Segijn, 2019). The exposure of consumers to communications, therefore, occurs most often in situations where their primary focus is not the goal-oriented task of consumption problem solving (both highly involved and looking for information to process) but, rather, the sensation seeker’s task of homo ludens: consuming entertainment media. Faced with overwhelming amounts of stimuli and confronted with information overload (Sauerland, Felser, and Krajewski, 2012), consumers most often seek to avoid commercial stimuli (Milosavljevic and Cerf, 2008). In such conditions of low involvement, the attention accorded to these stimuli is short and infrequent, as Pieters and Wedel (2004) have shown in the case of magazine advertisements. Consumers are thus mostly exposed to communications incidentally, and, accordingly, most brand communications are processed without consumers allocating specific attention to them (Derbaix, Herrmann, and Kacha, 2014). Many new forms of communications are increasingly integrated into the content of multiple media vehicles, and entertaining communication becomes an important part of the process (e.g., brand placements in video games, sponsoring activities, and advergames). It is, therefore, hardly surprising that situations in which consumers are potentially interacting with communications most often take place while these communications are not the focus of consumers’ attention (Ferraro, Bettman, and Chartrand, 2009; Grimes and Kitchen, 2007). Although it is understood that exposed consumers may, under certain conditions, allocate specific attention to communications (as can be seen in the discussion of the third reason given in the following text), the fact that these interactions with communications are characterized by the absence of specific attention is the norm nowadays when it comes to understanding the effects of contemporary marketing communications (e.g., Derbaix et al., 2014; Ferraro et al., 2009; Grimes and Kitchen, 2007).

Whereas the cognitive foundations of the hierarchy of effects and information-processing models consider that higher order effects for the brand depend on the level to which consumers pay attention and process brand information, the experiential view is much less restrictive. It is more open to the existence of higher order outcomes for the brand in the absence of a sufficient level of processing or even conscious perception; for example, the effect of sport sponsorship on spectators’ likelihood to include the sponsor brand in their consideration sets has been observed, even without awareness of the brand as an event sponsor (Herrmann, Corneille, Derbaix, et al., 2014; see also Santoso, Wright, Trinh, and Avis, 2022, for another example with Twitter advertisements). The experiential view of the “intervening response system (cognition-affect-behavior) that generates output consequences” proposed by Holbrook and Hirschman (1982, p. 132) clearly attested to this 40 years ago. They suggested that there is a need to go beyond the traditional view of the cognitive component, a structured memorial network of knowledge and beliefs, by also taking into account more latent content including “consumption-related flights of fancy involving pictorial imagery (Richardson, 1969), fantasies (Klinger, 1971), and daydreams (Singer, 1966),” (p. 136) which may result from less conscious cognitive processes.

Many new forms of communications are increasingly integrated into the content of multiple media vehicles, and entertaining communication becomes an important part of the process (e.g., brand placements in video games, sponsoring activities, and advergames).

Similarly, the affective component, which is traditionally restricted only to a part of the hedonic response (i.e., attitudes and preferences), encompasses in Holbrook and Hirschman’s experiential view a wide range of emotions and feelings. The same goes for the “behavior” component, traditionally focused on purchasing behavior, which is extended to the whole consumption experience, including physical and mental events relating to both action and reaction.

In terms of “output consequences,” whereas the conventional approach focuses on satisfaction of consumer needs through the utilitarian functions fulfilled by the product, the experiential view emphasizes the fun that the consumer derives from the experience of consuming the product (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982), which is in line with “play mentality” (Huizinga, 1970). This “stream of associations that occur during consumption (imagery, daydreams, emotions)” (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982, p. 138) is, therefore, an integral part of the value for the consumer, with perceived value being at the origin of the feedback loop representing the learning effects of a behavior on future behaviors. If the consumption of marketing communications as a service offered to customers is adopted, this feedback loop may represent a favorable (or unfavorable) learning effect for the forthcoming consumption of future communications of the same brand (Rosengren and Dahlen, 2015) or even affect consumption behaviors toward other brands and organizations’ communications more generally (Darke and Ritchie, 2007).

THE DEVELOPMENT OF INCREASINGLY ENTERTAINING COMMUNICATIONS

Not only has there been an explosion of new and unique formats, but communications have also become increasingly entertaining, blurring the boundaries between marketing communications and entertainment. The message now tends to be communicated in a less direct or factual way, explicitly signaling persuasive and commercial intention in favor of more indirect, playful (e.g., “the gamification of advertising”; Terlutter and Capella, 2013), and more subtle communications that arouse more sensations and fun and leave more room for consumers’ imagination.

Adopting, for example, the narrative persuasion logic (e.g., Kim, Ratneshwar, and Thorson, 2017) of transporting and engaging the consumer from the narrator’s perspective (e.g., van Laer, de Ruyter, Visconti, and Wetzels, 2014), an advertisement can tell the passion-filled story of the brand or product (Dahlen, Thorbjørnsen, Colliander, et al., 2020), its origin, its longevity (Pécot, Celhay, Kacha, and Lombard, 2022), its life, its projects, all in connection with certain events and symbols, thus reinforcing its expected perceived positioning. According to Filser (2002), this so-called “experiential dressing or packaging” revolves around three dimensions: the dramatization of the setting in favor of the product; the narrative that tells its story; and the actions that range from interactions between the consumers and the product to their opinions and recommendations on e-commerce sites, blogs, or social networks (originally observed in stores). In the field of communication, this kind of “experiential dressing or packaging” can, of course, be adopted in a variety of ways: for instance, utilizing characteristics such as syntax and images (Kim, Choi, and Wakslak, 2019); dimensionality (Li, Daugherty, and Biocca, 2003); graphics, colors, etc.; and using creative media choices (Dahlen and Edelnius, 2007). Most major brands use advertisements that combine various sensory stimuli (visual, auditory, tactile), including, for instance, crisp sounds or whispering (Sands, Campbell, Mavrommatis, and Kadomskaia, 2022), to trigger immersive and positive sensory experiences among consumers.

In the case of product placement, for example, this experiential dressing or packaging by nature also concerns the medium (e.g., the movie) that hosts the placed product as well as the execution characteristics of the placement itself, such as its more or less strong connection to the plot (or one of the main characters), as has been shown in the literature (Babin, Herrmann, Kacha, and Babin, 2021). Numerous other examples, some of which are event-based communications (e.g., trade fairs and exhibitions, company-organized or company-sponsored events), websites, or advergames (e.g., van Berlo, van Reijmersdal, and Eisend, 2021), would easily support the same analysis.

This development of more entertaining marketing communications constitutes another argument in favor of the relevance of the experiential view, because in this view, the consumer assumes the role of “producer” of the experience that she or he lives when interacting with objects, stimuli, or situations (i.e., producing a set of thoughts, emotions, activities, and value [TEAVs]). This “production” is induced by an experiential context (i.e., an assembly of stimuli “capable for bringing about an experience”; Carù and Cova, 2006, p. 44), an assembly of stimuli resulting from an experiential dressing or packaging (Filser, 2002).

It is now well accepted that value is cocreated with consumers as soon as they participate in the production of the expected service, giving them a more active role as they are both producer and consumer.

Given the diversity of consumption experiences in retail environments, Antéblian, Filser, and Roederer (2014) proposed a distinction that is based on whether consumers access physical experiential contexts directly or virtually through media such as computers, tablets, and smartphones. This distinction, which is based on the mode of access to the experiential shopping context, either directly or indirectly through technology, is easily transposable to current communication practices. Whereas nonevent communications, such as the multiple forms of advertising or product placement, usually require the mediation of technology to give consumers the possibility to interact with them, event-based communication (e.g., fairs or exhibitions, congresses, festive events, events organized by the brand or company, or even events sponsored by the brand or company) de facto offer consumers direct interactions with these physical experiential contexts as well as indirect or mediated interactions by means of live or deferred broadcasts.

THE INCREASINGLY ACTIVE ROLE OF CONSUMERS IN MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

Whereas the traditional market/economic approach places the creation of value within the company to satisfy consumers who are perceived mainly as passive information receivers, it is now well accepted that value is cocreated with consumers as soon as they participate in the production of the expected service (e.g., Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2000; Vargo and Lusch, 2004), giving them a more active role as they are both producer and consumer (cf. “prosumer”; e.g., Kozinets, Hemetsberger, and Schau, 2008; Ritzer, 2010; Toffler, 1980). As already pointed out, in the experiential view, the consumer is the producer of the experience that she or he is living when interacting with an experiential context made up of an assembly of stimuli.

In the field of communications, consumers also expect and have, today in the digital age, more possibilities to play an active role (Acar and Puntoni, 2016), for instance, in controlling the receiving of advertisements (e.g., with the remote control and video recorder) or, conversely, actively seeking certain contents and formats more generally (e.g., on YouTube). These fully empowered consumers, moreover, can be and are—younger generations, in particular—content creators of multiple forms (text, pictures, video, music, etc.), becoming simultaneously media content receivers and creators of their own content (Berthon, Pitt, and Campbell, 2008), and they can even be seen as content integrators as they control, to a certain extent, the marketing communication integration process (Kliatchko, 2008). “Much more consumer-to-firm, consumer-to-consumer, and consumer-about-firm communication exists. Because of increased social influences on purchase, word of mouth (WOM) and advocacy have become especially important; brand messaging is even less under the marketer’s control” (Batra and Keller, 2016, p. 122).

Under these contemporary conditions, consumers’ interactions with the experiential contexts provided by communications can give rise to a more or less active participation on the part of the consumer, similar to the three levels of participation distinguished by Antéblian et al. (2014) for consumption experiences in retail environments. The first level is “interpretative collaboration,” which echoes the set of cognitive and mental processes activated by stimuli perceived by consumers with more or less (or even no) attention (Derbaix et al., 2014) and triggers a set of TEAVs. This first level of consumer participation is present as soon as a consumer interacts with a communication context. As developed in the preceding text, it is worth underlining here how much the experiential view of TEAVs is much less restrictive and much more in line with current communication practices (contents, formats, and exposure conditions) than the traditional view of the CABS (cognition-affect-behavior-satisfaction) models (e.g., Engel, Kollat, and Blackwell, 1968; Howard and Sheth, 1969; Nicosia, 1966). In addition to the traditional knowledge and beliefs learned primarily through conscious memorization and learning processes that presume the consumer’s high involvement, thoughts also encompass mental elements (ideas and mental images, real or imaginary) resulting from less conscious and nonconscious cognitive processes. Similarly, emotion is no longer centered on the traditional attitudes and preferences resulting from beliefs about the product and the brand but focuses more on consumers’ feelings, expressive behaviors, and physiological responses. The same goes for action, extended to the consumption experience (and not restricted to purchase), which takes in everything that happens there, including physical and mental events relating to both actions and reactions. Finally, it is the same for value, which relates to consumers’ enjoyment, pleasure, and evaluative judgments.

A second level of consumer participation in consumption experiences in retail environments is called “directed self-production” (Antéblian et al., 2014, p. 93, italics in original), which involves the performance of all of the actions required of the consumer in the retail setting. This could involve events organized by brands and organizations (e.g., fairs, exhibitions, company visits, or open-days where consumers can directly interact through their five senses with the products) or brand-sponsored events (e.g., sports or cultural events), through consumers’ attendance at the events, visits to more or less immersive websites (e.g., Li et al., 2003), and participation in games, competitions, or advergames (Terlutter and Capella, 2013). Research has demonstrated how online sales sites, inspired by technologies developed in video games, for instance, offer the opportunity for visitors to represent themselves in the form of personalized avatars and allow them to live a more immersive and enriched experience (e.g., Garnier and Poncin, 2013). Similarly, visiting virtual worlds, such as Second Life, leads consumers to interact with brand outlets and, in turn, to positive effect (Haenlein and Kaplan, 2009).

The third and final level of consumer participation is called “creative coproduction” (Antéblian et al., 2014). In the field of marketing communications, this typically consists of activities such as consumer advertising (co)creation, (co)production, and even (co)broadcasting. Reflecting a specific subset of the more general phenomenon of user-generated content whereby consumers freely choose to create and share information of value, consumer-generated advertising refers to “specific instances where consumers create brand-focused messages with the intention of informing, persuading, or remembering others” (Campbell, Pitt, Parent, and Berthon, 2011b, p. 87). With the development of the Internet and inexpensive computer/smartphone cameras and video-production software, consumers are now creating and producing commercial slogans or digital advertisements, and even publishing them themselves by means of free platforms such as YouTube. This can occur through participation in a brand-sponsored contest or even spontaneously. The famous “Live the Flavor” advertisement that aired during the 2007 Super Bowl halftime (since generating millions of views and yielding untold publicity), with the winner of Frito-Lay’s competition inviting consumers to produce advertisements for their Doritos brand of chips, is an interesting example of consumer-generated advertisements resulting from participation in a brand-sponsored contest. Consumers, however, often participate spontaneously at their own convenience; that is without any brand invitation, brand endorsement, or even control over the content or the media. This active role adopted by empowered consumers has given rise to multiple forms of interaction and engagement behaviors related to brand communications (including advertisement hijacking in the form of parodies and spoof advertisements) on social media (e.g., forums, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, wikis, or virtual/online communities), including their resulting public conversations and communications.

DISCUSSION: CONTRIBUTIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

CONCLUSION

Advertising and, more generally, marketing communications have significantly changed in important ways. First, the combined development of information and communication technologies, new media, and new formats (Dahlen and Rosengren, 2016; Kumar and Gupta, 2016) has given rise to a myriad of new media, platforms, and marketing communications formats. As consumers are thus exposed more than ever to numerous marketing communications during their daily activities, they are, most often incidentally, exposed to communications without allocating specific attention to them (Derbaix et al., 2014). Second, not only has there been an explosion of the number of marketing communications that consumers are exposed to incidentally, but marketing communications have also become increasingly entertaining, with the message being communicated in a less direct, factual, and verbal way in favor of more fun, arousing executions. Third, consumer behaviors have evolved with the development of information and communication technologies and new media. Given these new possibilities to play a more active role, consumers can now not only control or, conversely, seek the marketing communications they want to be exposed to and/or participate in, but they can also become producers and generate communication content themselves (Berthon et al., 2008).

Although advertising and marketing communications have changed a lot, the theoretical perspective seemingly has not, with the focus still primarily on the conscious processing of verbal information in advertising/communication despite regular criticisms (see, e.g., Heath and Feldwick, 2008). This essay, therefore, urges researchers and practitioners to open up the theoretical framework of marketing communication research beyond the traditional and still predominant information-processing paradigm to bring in the experiential view (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982), ultimately providing an enhanced framework for examining the effects of contemporary marketing communications. During the course of this essay, it has been argued that the experiential view offers a more elaborate account of consumers’ incidental exposure to numerous communications and the effects of brand stimuli perceived without awareness, the development of increasingly entertaining communications, and the increasingly active role of empowered consumers in marketing communications.

Compared with the traditional information-processing paradigm, the experiential view places the emphasis on consumers’ interactions with marketing communications, which are seen like so many experiential contexts, thus attributing to consumers the role of producers of the interaction experiences they live, as well as the TEAVs they get as a result. Fully acknowledging the human (homo ludens) playful nature of consumers, the experiential view offers a better accounting of the TEAVs resulting from mental processes that occur under prevalent low-attention situations, as well as the TEAVs resulting from more conscious situations that require higher levels of attention.

For marketing communication researchers as well as practitioners, the addition of the experiential view should provide a more complete understanding of the effects of marketing communications, but it requires a reexamination of both traditional methodologies and measures. First, and in line with the holistic perspective of the experiential view, researchers and practitioners are encouraged to adopt a more holistic approach that aims to track at a meta-experience level everything that is both consciously and nonconsciously experienced about a communication, brand, or organization at a given moment (e.g., after a communication campaign) rather than focusing only on a microinteraction experience with a given advertisement. Second, researchers and practitioners are encouraged to go beyond tracking consumers’ memorization and verbalization of marketing communications content, attitudes, and purchase intentions toward the brand, by means of more indirect measures such as implicit measures capable of accessing features, meanings, associations, evaluations, and intentions even outside of consumers’ awareness. To this end, a series of implicit measures has been highlighted earlier, as well as the interest to strive to link them with behavioral data.

The experiential view is already 40 years old, but its adoption to enhance the theoretical framework of marketing communication research is still far from being achieved. It is our hope that the arguments and recommendations outlined herein will contribute to address this decisive and exciting challenge and, in turn, advance advertising and marketing communication knowledge development for practitioners and researchers.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jean-Luc Herrmann is Full Professor of Management Sciences (Marketing) and Director of the CEREFIGE Research Center at the University of Lorraine, Metz, France. His research interests focus on persuasive communication, especially on advertising, sponsorship and product placement effects. He has recently published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Advertising, and Recherche et Applications en Marketing (the leading French marketing journal).

John B. Ford is professor of marketing, eminent scholar, and Haislip-Rohrer Fellow at Old Dominion University. He has published 100 articles in journals such as the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Psychology and Marketing, and Stanford Social Innovation Review, among others. He is the immediate past editor-in-chief of the Journal of Advertising Research. His research interests are cross-cultural research methodology, global advertising strategy, gender issues in advertising, and nonprofit donor behavior.