Introduction

Since the introduction of the idea that consumption involves a “steady flow of fantasies, feelings, and fun encompassed by what we call the experiential view” (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982, p. 132), the concept of customer experience has played a crucial role for both marketing practitioners and academics. Experiential marketing refers to the strategies of staging and creating offerings for the purpose of facilitating extraordinary experiences (Carù & Cova, 2003; Pine & Gilmore, 1999). Customer experiences with brands along all touchpoints and branding instruments are crucial to the branding process, whether extraordinary or not (Brakus, Schmitt, & Zarantonello, 2009). The value of the experience is co-created, and the result of interactions between a single firm or a brand – the experience provider – and the customer, but also between a whole network of firms, employees, brands, experts or opinion leaders and this customer (Tynan & McKechnie, 2009). Reciprocally, brands play an important role in this process of experience co-creation (Tynan & McKechnie, 2009). Differentiation, a main driver of experiential marketing, is a crucial function of brands in both B2C and B2B (Kotler, Pfoertsch, & Michi, 2006), and brands themselves are rich sources of “sensory, affective, and cognitive associations that result in memorable and rewarding brand experiences” (Schmitt, 1999a, p. 57). A specific branding instrument which uses experiential marketing techniques, the flagship store, is called the “apex of branding” (Dolbec & Chebat, 2013, p. 460). But also other instruments of branding, for example permanent, physical branded locations such as brand lands, brand museums, or customer experience centers, which we summarize with flagship stores under the umbrella term “brand worlds”, deliver powerful branded experiences much stronger than regular advertising, based on their direct, highly interactive visitor-brand encounters and experiential marketing techniques (Borghini et al., 2009; Wood, 2009; Zarantonello & Schmitt, 2013). Indisputably, this holds true for the emotional realm of consumer marketing. There can hardly be a greater achievement for a brand than fully materializing in its own successful brand world, such as the Walt Disney World, the World of Coca-Cola, the Hershey Park, the VW Autostadt or the Apple Flagship Stores. Since branding in B2B increasingly attracts attention (Keränen, Piirainen, & Salminen, 2012; Leek & Christodoulides, 2011; Seyedghorban, Matanda, & LaPlaca, 2016), the question arises which role experiential marketing and its techniques play in this context. Its instruments and techniques have been mentioned as a possibility for B2B companies to create strong, memorable customer experiences (Gilmore & Pine, 2002; Pine & Gilmore, 1999; Schmitt, 1999b), but only trade shows have been investigated from an experiential perspective on business markets, and without a branding perspective (Rinallo, Borghini, & Golfetto, 2010). This gap in research can be explained with the predominant notion of rational and professional actors in the business context, as opposed to the original experiential value sources of “fantasies, feelings, and fun” (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982, p. 132). Trade show experiences create value first and foremost when they support the B2B visitors in their business activities, “no matter how entertaining or spectacular they may be” (Rinallo et al., 2010, p. 256). This preliminary understanding of experiential marketing in business markets is followed by a call for further research on other experiential marketing instruments and the determinants of their effectiveness (Rinallo et al., 2010). Nevertheless, industrial marketing practitioners have already discovered the branding potential of experiential marketing techniques. B2B brand worlds can in fact be found all over the planet, such as for example the Caterpillar Visitors Center or the Customer Experience Centers of General Electric and Honeywell Process Solutions in the US, the Innovation Center of logistics provider DHL or the Stahlwelt of Austrian steel producer Voestalpine in Europe, or the Mitsubishi Minatomirai Industrial Museum in Asia. But in contrast to their B2C counterparts, these instruments of branding, which employ experiential marketing techniques, have not attracted academic attention yet (Österle, Kuhn, & Henseler, 2016).