It is nice to qoute Henry James, “Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue”. Customers always are in experiencing process. They update their knowledge and understanding, or recall the previous experiences. That means ‘customer experience’ is endless process. This fact, once again, underlines the significance of experience dynamic in modern marketing. On the other hand, experience is totally personal and customers thus subjectively interpret the evidences in entire interactions into their individual experience. Thereby, there are no two customers with same experience.
The aim of this introduction is to highlight the difference between customer experience management and experience marketing. If we assume experience is completely personal, and then managing experience is based on the philosophy of utilizing customer perception toward firm’s benefit, regardless the experience is crated on purpose or it is the reflection of total offering experience. In short, firm, first, determines the positive and negative experience. Then firm exploits the positive one and eliminates the negative one. Therefore, experience design is not the essential part of experience management. However, it is a continuous process in any organization; since, experience formation is an endless concept.
In contrast, experience marketing is a marketing practice to market the brand through extraordinary experience. In this concept, there is no stress on the dynamism of experience. Experience is design to promote the offering for specific period. Alternatively, marketing try to promote an offering by emphasizing on the consumption experience rather than feature and benefits. In both case, marketers design an experience to differentiate the brand. In first condition, experience works as a tool for promotion. Event marketing is a simple example for this approach. Above this, some brand, besides the features, address a different life style, emotional values, and relational needs… as experiential values that associates with the brand. For instance, hedonic products are promoted through experience marketing.
As a result, marketing experience is a strategic practice to market offering, while experience management is a strategic approach to retain customer. However, a holistic approach to customer experience is the combination of creating and sustaining experience rather than focusing on only one concept.
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