Brand Experience and Consumers' Willingness to Pay a Price Premium: How Physical Brand Events Shape Perceived Uniqueness, Brand Trust, and Brand Loyalty in a Mature Market

The rise of the experience economy has reshaped the competitive landscape, making physical brand events – a firm-controlled form of experiential marketing – a favoured instrument for eliciting brand experience. For a brand, the return on such events may be measured in the ability to command a price premium, which is hard to sustain in mature markets and low-involvement product categories due to commoditization. Because this return depends on how consumers perceive and relate to the brand rather than on firm-centred financial metrics, it is best examined through the Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) perspective, which locates brand value in consumers' perceptions, judgments, and relationships. Against this background, the thesis investigates whether brand experience, elicited by physical brand events, influences consumers' willingness to pay a price premium for a brand in a low-involvement product category within a mature market, and through which CBBE mechanisms – specifically perceived uniqueness, brand trust, and brand loyalty – this relationship operates, while testing brand familiarity and price sensitivity as moderators. Using the Nespresso brand as study context, data from a hypothetical scenario-based online questionnaire of 100 respondents were analysed with PLS-SEM (SmartPLS 4) in a multiple parallel mediation framework. The findings indicate that brand experience does not directly increase willingness to pay a price premium: its effect operates only indirectly, in a pattern of full (indirect-only) mediation. Perceived uniqueness is the most robust mediating pathway, together with brand loyalty, whereas brand trust, although significantly activated, does not act as a mediator. Neither brand familiarity nor price sensitivity is supported as a moderator; both instead emerged as direct antecedents. The study brings the brand experience, CBBE, and willingness to pay a price premium literatures together within a single model and contributes methodologically by showing that closed- and open-ended measures of the premium are related but not interchangeable.