The Study On The Experiential Marketing Of Xiahe Tibetan Tourism

Xiahe County is in the northwest of Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Gansu Province. There are fourteen ethnic groups, such as Tibet, Hui, Mongolia and so on. In Xiahe County, Tibetan accounts for78%of the total population, thus it is a typical Tibetan-inhabited area. There are abundant natural tourism resources in Xiahe County, the vast and beautiful Sanke Grasslands is just located here. Because of its mysterious Labrang Lamasery, Xiahe was honoured as "Oriental Vatican". However, owing to the constraints of geographic weakness, capital shortage, expertise inadequate, backward marketing concept and policies, Xiahe Tibetan tourism is still less-developed. With the rapid growth of ethnic tourism, Xiahe Tibetan Autonomous attracted more and more people’s attention. Meanwhile, the traditional traveling pattern, which takes a hurried and cursory glance at scenic spots, is out of date and cannot meet visitors’higher and higher expectations, let alone attract more target tourists to destinations.In experience economy era, the American marketing expert Brand H. Schmitt advocated a new theory "Experiential Marketing" in1999. It provided the key to the bottleneck of ethnic tourism development. This theory breaked the traditional marketing assumption and emphasized more on consumers’ emotional contact so that to achieve an impressive and lasting experience in their mind. This paper took Xiahe tourism as an example, analyzed the current situation and bottleneck of Xiahe Tibetan tourism, borrowed the advanced experiential marketing theory and designed practical experiential marketing strategies so as to provide theoretical support for Xiahe.This paper adopted SWOT analysis to analyze the tourism situation of Xiahe, summed up its strength and weakness, as well as opportunities and threats in this competitive tourist industry. Next, in order to design practical experiential strategies, field survey and online questionnaire survey methods were adopted in this paper. I collected questionnaires from100respondents. The survey result showed that most of the tourists expected more experiential activities. This paper drawed lessons from the experiential theory and classic cases, planned experiential patterns to cater for target people. Last but not least, in order to put the experiential models into practice, this paper proposed some supporting measures, including promoting internal marketing for tourism personnel, cultivating their innovative consciousness and protecting ecological environment. Thus, this paper is in the hope of providing theoretical support and reference for Xiahe Tibetan tourism...