ABSTRACT
In just a few years, immersion in a consumption experience has become a major theme in consumer behavior literature. A consumption experience is understood here as the possibility of developing meaning and substance in life. Contemporary consumers supposedly prefer being immersed in consumption experiences to simply purchasing products or services. Consumption is made up of “immersion into experiential moments of enchanted, multifaceted and spectacular encounters” (Firat and Dholakia, 1998, p. 101). Experiential marketing approaches (Pine and Gilmore, 1999) and postmodern consumption rhetoric (Firat and Dholakia, 1998) make widespread use of an immersion concept that has been borrowed from more or less distant disciplines such as education, literature, psychology, or religion. The concept’s utilization has accelerated along with the rise of the Internet, due to many online operators’ apparent attempts to immerse consumers in a virtual experience. Without forgetting the arts, where the immersion process has long been considered key to an esthetic experience, this construct is used today by analysts interested in a whole range of activities, including tourism, leisure (concerts, festivals, etc.), and sports. To really grasp this notion, which is central to the consumption experience, the present chapter will begin by developing a consumer immersion model before going on to specify the main elements of the experiential contexts that firms can create and manage. It will then conclude by detailing the tactics that firms and other institutions can pursue to facilitate immersion in an experiential context.
