Affective–Operational Alignment in Heritage Service Design: Semiotics, Emotion, and Experience Management in the National Trust’s Christmas Campaign

This paper examines how the National Trust employs experiential marketing to design Christmas as a multi-sensory, co-created heritage service experience. Analyzing forty-five artifacts from the 2023–2024 campaign through social semiotics, it identifies a three-layered narrative structure of Festive Experiences, Feelings and Emotions, and Management of Experience, that aligns authenticity, nostalgia, and spectacle. The findings show how sensory and emotional cues transform intangible heritage into a tangible experience. The paper contributes to services marketing by revealing the symbolic and affective dimensions of experience design. It offers managerial insights for creating culturally resonant, commercially viable, and emotionally inclusive heritage services.