Event Marketing and Customer Experience in India's Service Sector: A Systematic Review of the Literature (2008–2026)

Event marketing has grown from a peripheral promotional tactic into a budgeted, recurring instrument that Indian service organisations now use to build trust with consumers who cannot inspect, sample or return an intangible offering before they buy it. This paper systematically reviews close to seventy empirical and conceptual studies published between 2008 and 2026 on experiential marketing, event marketing, customer experience and buying decisions, drawing the source material from a wider doctoral thesis on event marketing in India's service sector. The review is organised thematically across hospitality and tourism, retail and e-commerce, banking and financial services, healthcare and insurance, food and everyday services and event marketing as a distinct discipline, before turning to the demographic variables most often tested as moderators. Three recurring limitations emerge. Demographic moderation is almost always tested one variable at a time rather than as a full set. Event marketing factors are rarely compared against one another within a single instrument. Indian studies, in turn, remain confined to single cities or single sectors rather than a PAN India, multi-sector design. The paper closes by arguing that these three gaps, taken together, define the space in which future Indian service-sector research on event marketing needs to sit.