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The purpose of this paper is to investigate business visitor behaviour at trade shows and to propose a complementary view based on the experiential perspective in marketing.

The paper reports an ethnographic study conducted in the context of ten international trade shows in the textile‐apparel industry in Europe.

The study sheds light on the nature of the experience provided by trade show exhibitors and organisers and on visitors' lived experiences. Trade shows immerse industrial buyers in a physical and cognitive experience that requires their active participation. Under such circumstances, industrial marketers who employ experiential marketing techniques are likely to increase their trade show performances.

The paper adopts a new perspective that sees business visitor behaviour from an experiential standpoint and discusses the managerial implications that highlight the interplay of exhibitors and trade show organisers in designing and setting valuable experiences for visitors.

The aim of this paper is twofold: to propose a new theoretical framework to interpret organizational creativity as a process of situated and distributed cognition in a sense‐making perspective; and to identify the system of tools which influences this process.

The analysis developed in the paper is theoretical, as it is rooted in a rich literature review concerning organizational creativity and in the proposal to enrich these studies by applying a cognitive and a sense‐making perspective.

The paper provides a novel framework as well as new levels of analysis.

Compared with previous contributions, the main theoretical thesis is that a firm's creativity is achieved only if some of the well‐established mediating structures that influence creativity are intentionally broken or renewed. This proposal can provide insights for researchers and managers as well.

This paper aims to study the role of ideology in brand strategy with reference to large‐scale food retailing. By means of a thorough case study investigation of highly ideology‐focused food retailer Eataly, the paper aims to enrich existing theory on retailer branding. The various elements of Eataly's brand have been studied in order to identify how they enact the ideology for which the retailer stands. This topic is particularly relevant in a context where consumers appear increasingly committed to social responsibility and business ethics. So the final goal of the paper is to identify ideology‐focused brand choices that lead to a preference towards the retailer.

In order to address this paper's research aim, a well known framework developed by Esbjerg and Bech‐Larsen is adopted to conceptualize the retail brand. Case study methodology is applied.

This paper provides both research‐related and practical contributions. From a research perspective, it provides empirical evidence on the role of ideology in large‐scale food retailing, a field which has been traditionally neglected in the ideology debate. From a practical perspective, it provides a contribution to retailers and brand managers. Three main lessons can be mentioned. First, a company's ideology should be pervasively applied to each aspect of a brand and it seems to be primarily situated within tangible and physical attributes, rather than within symbolic features, at least in the case investigated. Second, an explicit ideology is not exempt from risks. Third, ideology can be subject to multiple interpretations that may give rise to unintended consequences.

This study tries to attenuate the reliability issues that are inherent in qualitative research by interviewing multiple informants with different positions inside the company. Triangulation using different types of data sources and systematic data analysis was also employed.

The paper raises the importance of ideology in large‐scale food retailing. It adopts the Esbjerg and Bech‐Larsen framework and introduces the dimension of ideology as a lens through which each aspect of a brand can be interpreted. Moreover, it suggests that a brand's functional attributes play more of a leading role in transmitting ideology than symbolic features, which is somewhat counterintuitive.