The Effect of Experiential Marketing on Brand Equity and Performance of the Tourism Industry in Ghana.

The rise of competition in the current global market has made companies create new strategies focusing on customers in order to enhance business fortunes. With changing times, differentiating a business only with the traditional promotional elements such as product, price and quality does not create the needed brand value and competitive advantage. This outdated approach to marketing communications is dying and this is how the idea of using experiential marketing came up. To stress the fact that direct interaction at an event may result in memorable brand experiences and willingness to revisit, event practitioners have begun to refer to event marketing as “experiential marketing” (Sugiyarti and Hendar (2017). This study reviews the existing literature that is directly related to the variables used in the study. It consists of key theories on both experiential marketing, brand equity and performance (theoretical review) and past empirical studies by research scholars. The study will adopt the descriptive and explanatory research designs, whilst the research approaches will be the mixed method. The study uses a combination of secondary and primary data. The secondary data will involve using published reports, books, academic research papers, articles, journals and other online media sources from the field of marketing. Primary data will be gathered using qualitative research methods through face-to-face interviews with tourists. Survey questionnaires will be disseminated to a cross-section of tourists in the various destinations in Ghana. Purposive and convenience sampling procedures will be used to select about 500 participants for the survey. The chi-square test and partial least squares version of the structural equation modeling will be used for the data analysis. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) & inferential statistics will also be used to identify the relationship between the variables. The software to be used for the estimation of the parameters will be statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) and AMOS software to code, enter and compute the measurements for the study. The expected results of the study indicates a positive association between the constructs in general. Thus, experiential marketing has significant impact on brand equity and performance. It is believed that this study will contribute new knowledge and suggest directions for future research.