Content area
Full text
Introduction
Trade show events are more than a $100bn industry, with more than 24,500 trade shows are organized each year all across the world (Singh et al., 2017). These business events serve as an essential platform for developing international business relationships, empowering market entry for new companies, monitoring international competition and promoting destination tourism (Geigenmüller, 2010; Singh et al., 2017).
Trade shows are destined to provide development opportunity to a nation’s industries and help in creating new tourism destinations (Whitfield and Webber, 2011). Trade shows deliver unique and memorable experiences to the participants. Experiences are the sole outcomes of events that influence behavioural intentions of the event participants (Lin and Lin, 2016). Experiences are an integral part of the event participants’ (Pine and Gilmore, 1998). Therefore, it is necessary to inspect the meaning attached to the experience of a trade show event so that distinct and meaningful trade shows can be created.
Moreover, the brand experience framework proposed by Brakus et al. (2009) has also not been explicitly explored in the business event literature. Experiences associated with trade shows are not explored comprehensively in the event literature. Therefore, the exploration of experiences can contribute to an improved understanding of the relationship between the event and participants (Gottlieb et al., 2011; Lin and Lin, 2016). Moreover, to the best of the authors' knowledge, no previous research has attempted to explore experiences in the trade show event context.
India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Trade show industry in India is valued at INR 254bn with INR 214.7bn of the contribution is through indirect impact, and INR 39.5bn is through direct impact with 727 trade shows organized every year (IEIA, 2018). The indirect impact is formed by recreation and shopping; food and beverage; local transportation; and accommodation. The direct impact includes spending by exhibitors towards rental and services (IEIA, 2018). In 2017, India showed the highest growth rate in space selling in Asian continent (Rai and Nayak, 2018).
However, the event industry in India is lagging behind in the global exhibition market by up to 25-40 per cent in pricing, and lack of consistent quality participants in the event (IEIA, 2018). Trade shows are an experiential marketing platform (Tafesse and...