PROS AND CONS OF EXPERIENTIAL MANAGEMENT AND MARKETING: THE CASE OF A MICRO SIZED IMPORTING COMPANY

In today's management and marketing world, new trends show their positive influence and negative effects on organizations. Technology and social media appear among the foremost new trends that shape the establishments' structural and functional performance. Though technology and social media look like taking the place of the real world, it is thought that both of these trends seem to offer the users differentiated experience platforms and they play complimentary roles for real-life experiences. When it comes to experiential management and marketing, organizations may prefer different combinations of real-life and on-line activities or shares. How they do this combination, why they do this combination and what makes the difference among the organizations resulting from these choices suggest the possible sources of inspiration for theory and practice. This paper mainly and briefly covers information management activities related to the subjects of experiential management and marketing with the support of the case of a micro sized importing company. The study focusing on a unique example of a family company, and its one-to-one and mass marketing applications for the imported products, includes the extraordinary traces of both customer relationship management and managerial decisions. The literature review of the study emphasizes the subjects of experiential management and marketing from the point of customer relations, technology and social media versus real-life experience, micro organizations and the international dimensions of the prementioned headings. For the methodology of this study, the case study method and interview technique are preferred. For the findings, the important characteristics of this company in relation to experiential and customer relationship management (CRM), marketing and managerial decisions are summarized. In spite of the fact that the research is limited with only one firm, the paper is a special one on its own with its findings' originality for future studies that will concentrate on the irreplaceable role of experiential efforts in management and marketing.