The essay should be titled Experiential Marketing in Contemporary Retailing’. Your essay should examine examples of experiential marketing for organisations with an international presence/footprint.

Notes for students

• Carefully review the literature associated with Experiential Marketing.  From your reading, identify the criteria which you will use to assess retailers’ application of the concepts associated with the theory.  This is a very important part of the assignment, as insufficient effort here will render the rest of the task very difficult to complete.

• What you observe should cover appropriate elements of the retail marketing mix.

• In the lectures, we will be reviewing the theory of Experiential Marketing. You are expected to research this material on your own and including details from it in your own answer.  As this is a fairly new area of research, you are unlikely to find much material in textbooks.  Consequently, you will need to consult academic journals.  When doing online searches for relevant articles, you may need to think of search words in addition to that of Experiential Marketing, e.g. leisure shopping, and similar.  Business press and quality newspapers are also good sources of information.  (See the reading list in this module information pack for some suggestions).

• Select the retail outlets, which you are going to review.  For instance, you may wish to review a range of different types of retailers.  Alternatively, you may wish to review some stores that sell similar types of goods, but have a different positioning.  The choice of retail outlets and their number is free for you do decide.  However, choosing too many is likely to result in a report lacking in in-depth analysis.

• Make sure that your essay is evaluative and not descriptive.  You are required to include references to the literature throughout your assignment in order to demonstrate your extent of reading.

• Your essay should finish with a conclusion outlining your main findings in relation to the extent to which/how the retailers you observed apply the concepts of Experiential Marketing.

Assessment Criteria

1. The extent to which the criteria identified to review the retailers are appropriate.
2. The extent to which the retailers selected represents an appropriate choice, providing opportunity for evaluation.
3. The extent to which the retail observations are thorough, the discussion is evaluative and demonstrates insight into the subject matter, both theoretically and in an applied sense.
4. The extent to which additional academic background research has been undertaken and used resourcefully within the essay.
5. The skills of essay writing in terms of structure, clarity of expression, Harvard referencing, adherence to the word limit and inclusion of bibliography.