Knowing how to improve urban consumers’ well-being is of great importance for sustainable urban development and has become a research hotspot in the field of service marketing, which is evolving from functionality-focused view into experience-focused view. This study explored the mechanism and boundary conditions of experiential marketing on urban consumers’ well-being with a survey data collected from 256 consumers in the catering service industry in China. The results showed that experiential marketing had a significant positive impact on consumer well-being, experiential value played a partial mediation role between experiential marketing and consumer well-being, value proposition engagement moderated the relationship between experiential value and consumer well-being, and value proposition engagement moderated the mediation role of experiential value between experiential marketing and consumer well-being. This study complements the literature of transformative service by revealing a complex mechanism relating to the effects of experiential marketing on urban consumers’ well-being and provides theoretical guidance for service enterprises to improve their offerings.

PurposeBased on a dyadic perspective, the purpose of this paper is to include the contributions of employee and customer in a service process and to examine the underlying mechanism of customer organization socialization on service performance.Design/methodology/approachThe authors used a unique survey data pertaining to the service industry. The authors collected their data from multiple sources (customers, front-line employees and these employees' managers) in the divisions of a large service organization – Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China. The authors adopted hierarchical regression moderated path analysis approach to examine our moderated mediation model.FindingsThe authors find that both the quality of customer service and the quality of employee service play as moderators in the relationship between customer organization socialization and service performance. And quality of customer service moderates the relationship between customer organization socialization and quality of employee service.Originality/valueThe literature has focused primarily on service performance improvement based on the dyadic perspective of customer and employee. The research develops a moderated mediation model and contributes to the literature by empirically examining customer organization socialization.