5. Discussion and conclusion
5.1. Understanding the nature of B2B brand worlds and how they are experienced
Brand worlds as the apex of branding, which use experiential marketing techniques, have made their way from the consumer area into business marketing practice. Given the different B2B context (Brown et al., 2007), the direct transfer of theories, frameworks, and knowledge from B2C to B2B should be approached with caution. In order to understand the nature and phenomenon of brand worlds in the B2B context and how they are experienced, we conducted exploratory empirical research with the goal to get a comprehensive view on brand worlds, and interviewed operating companies, exhibition designers, and business visitors. We now synthesize and interpret our findings and summarize our comprehensive view on B2B brand worlds in Fig. 2. In B2C, when visiting a brand world, consumers are driven by and expect hedonic aspects. Consumer visits take place fully unrelated to specific purchase intentions and are based completely on consumer's own intention to visit. In contrary, business visitors to B2B brand worlds are motivated by and expect more utilitarian aspects. Their visits are usually related to specific purchasing intentions, initial business contacts, or an already existing customer-brand relationship, in the process of which they are invited by the operating company to a company visit. In fact, they often do not visit the company to ‘visit the brand world’, but to conduct their general business activities, such as meetings, workshops, negotiations, audits, relationship maintenance, or trainings. Looking at the what, namely what the B2B brand worlds consists of, its contents and the experiencescape, and further to its nature and what its purpose is in B2B, our research shows that against this professional background, it is used by the operating company as a ‘business card’, a tool where the company presents itself, its core, values, identity and products at a glance for the visitor to experience. It is a complementary instrument to provide the visitor with either an additional experience to present a positive, credible image, or as an extraordinary and stimulating location in which, by the provision of additional, unique information and the possibility to experience the brand, its products and employees ‘in-vivo’, mutual value in the form of learning, epistemic, and knowledge, relationship, or professional value is created. Based on these relevant experiences they provide for the visitor, B2B brand worlds are the ideal locus for or complementation to such business activities related to specific purchasing intentions, initial business contacts, or the deepening of an already existing business relationship.
