Understanding casino experiential attributes: An application to market positioning

• This research contributes to both the literature by exploring the experiential attributes customers seek in casinos.
• This study also examine the role of customer characteristics on these attributes.
• The authors present a perceptual map illustrating the position of major casinos in Macau based on the experiential attributes.
• This is the first study that incorporates experiential attributes in understanding the position of service providers.

Customer experience is becoming more critical in the service encounter. Although the literature is beginning to understand the role of experience in enticing customer satisfaction and loyalty, the criteria of customer experience evaluation is missing. The objective of this article is to explore the attributes that customers use to gage their experience in the context of the casino. In addition, the relationships between customer characteristics and the experience attributes are also investigated. The authors present a perceptual map illustrating the market position of major casinos in Macau based on the experiential attributes customers defined. The findings shed new light on the understanding of customer experience and provide scholars and managers insights into the factors that relate to various experiential attributes in the context of casinos. This study also presents an alternative method that allows researchers to interpret the dimensions of a perceptual map more objectively.