Content uploaded by Arch G. Woodside
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Arch G. Woodside on Apr 26, 2015
Content may be subject to copyright.
Introduction
Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) proposals for an emerging service-centred dominant
logic of marketing serve as the foundation for the present article’s explication
of interpreting customers’ experiences with brands. Vargo and Lusch (2004)
propose that a service- versus product-centred view of exchange implies that
the marketing goal is to customise offerings, to recognise that the customer
is always the co-producer, and to strive to maximise consumer involvement
in the customisation to better fit his or her needs.
This perspective centres on consumers thinking about and buying/
consuming brands as primary subjective states of the combined unconscious
and consciousness of a variety of symbolic meanings, hedonic responses,
and aesthetic criteria (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982). Subsequently, Havlena
and Holbrook (1986) and Westbrook and Oliver (1991) explicate the roles
of emotions in consumption experiences. Mano and Oliver (1993) discuss
The Marketing Review, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 205-225
http://dx.doi.org/10.1362/146934711X589435
ISSN1469-347X print / ISSN 1472-1384 online ©Westburn Publishers Ltd.
Customer experiences with brands:
Literature review and research directions
Ahmed Rageh Ismail, Fayoum University, Egypt*
TC Melewar, Brunel University, UK
Lynn Lim, Roehampton University, UK
Arch Woodside, Boston College, USA
The concept of customer experience is evolving to an ever more imperative area
of study within the marketing discipline. Despite its importance and the positive
attention this concept is receiving in the literature, the explanation of customer
experiences remains vague and a thorough theoretical foundation is lacking.
This paper addresses this gap in the literature facilitating a brand-management
understanding of the concept of customer experience and its antecedents and
consequences. The paper examines the impact of customer experience on brand
loyalty via a comprehensive review of existing literature on the concept of customer
experience and service brand literature. In addition, twelve propositions describe
and explain the antecedents of customer experience and impacts upon brand
loyalty within a service-centred marketing logic. This paper contributes a novel
customer-brand experience perspective and conceptual tools relevant for further
theory development and for effectively managing customer-brand relationships.
Keywords Customer experience, Brand loyalty, Experiential services
*Correspondence details and biographies for the authors are located at the end of the article.
measures of experiential aspects. Research reports focus on analysing an
increasing tendency towards creating “experiences” for customers in order
to gain a competitive advantage, particularly for those in the service sector.
Thereafter, the existing economy transforms to a new experience economy
(Pine & Gilmore, 1999; Vargo & Lusch, 2004).
The focus on consumption experience in the area of marketing has a long
history with germination in the 1940s and empirical research take-off in the
1980s. Norris (1940 in Holbrook, 2000) refers to value creation through the
experiences that brands provide to consumers. Subsequently, Toffler (1970) in
Future Shock stresses the concept of consumption experience. Generally, the
notion of customer experience received theoretical recognition in the mid-
1980s in Holbrook and Hirschman’s (1982) and Hirschman and Holbrook’s
(1982) discussions of consumption experience and hedonic consumption.
Following the emergence of customer experience, contributions from
scholars focus on customer experience contributing value for firms (Addis
& Holbrook, 2001; Carù & Cova, 2003; LaSalle & Britton, 2003; Milligan
& Smith, 2002; Ponsonby-McCabe & Boyle, 2006; Prahalad & Ramaswamy,
2004; Schmitt, 1999, 2003; Shaw & Ivens, 2002; Smith & Wheeler, 2002). A
careful review of the extant marketing literature reveals only a few attempts
to define the concept of customer experience and its dimensions. In other
words, the concept has poor definition at present (Carù & Cova, 2003).
Practitioners and academics alike argue that an essential strategy for success
in the marketplace is the creation and maintenance of satisfied customers
(Reichheld & Sasser, 1990). However, studies consistently show that overall
switching among satisfied customers across many industries is approaching
80% (Keaveney, 1995; Oliver, 1999).
High switching behaviour is less a question of satisfaction with the
brand than an absence of lived-pleasure during immersion (Carù & Cova,
2007) into the service production platform (Arvidsson, 2005, 2006).
Therefore, researchers begin with the proposition that customer experience
affects loyalty behaviour (Barsky & Nash, 2002; Berry, Carbone & Haeckel,
2002). Customers seek much more than a product or service, or even a
brand or its company to satisfy them. They want a unique experience that
fulfills their desires (Spreng, MacKenzie & Olshavsky, 1996; Vandenbosch &
Dawar, 2002), i.e. experience that suggests the elicitation of higher levels of
emotion than those associated with either satisfaction or delight. They also
look for the unique experiences of co-creating the product with producer-
consumer engagement (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004), though frequently
their thinking about what they are seeking is implicit rather than explicit.
Achieving such experiences is more likely to develop into long-term loyal
customers. Customer experience and its link to the bottom line remain largely
unexplored in academic research.
Therefore, this paper is aiming to address this gap in the literature and to
facilitate better understanding of the concept of customer experience and its
antecedents and consequences from the consumer perspective. The purpose
of this paper is two-fold: first, to examine an under-researched construct
of customer experience; and second, to investigate the antecedents and
consequences of customer experience with particular attention paid to brand
loyalty.
The Marketing Review, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 3
206
Ismail, Melewar, Lim & Woodside Customer experiences with brands
This paper provides service marketers with a deeper understanding of
the various elements of experience that shape customer experience with
the brand. Thus, the various definitions and dimensionality of the customer
experience are summarised in the first section of this paper. The first section
also discusses the experience and its relationship to the service brand, and
highlights the importance of consumption emotions as an integral part of
the customer experience. Section two of this paper depicts the proposed
conceptual framework and the antecedents and consequences of customer
experience, in addition to the propositions. The final section offers
conclusions.
Literature review
An increasing tendency is occurring towards creating unique “experiences”
for customers in order to gain a competitive advantage, particularly for those
in the service sector. Hereafter, this article describes the existing economy as
“the new experience economy” (Pine & Gilmore, 1999). Table 1 presents the
different definitions of experience.
The notion of customer experience is hardly a new concept, because
market researchers have tended to focus on the consumption experience for
the past few decades. However, this phenomenon has not been an essential
ingredient of the economy in the past decades. Therefore, this paper will
address the re-emergence of experience and its importance at the present
time. Pine and Gilmore (1999) were among the first to write about the
emergence of a new service economy named the experience economy. “A
new, emerging economy is coming to the fore, one based on a distinct kind
of economic output, goods and services are no longer enough” (Pine &
Gilmore, 1999, p.11). Schmitt (1999, p.3) reiterated the opinion of Pine and
Gilmore (1999) when he stated that:
“we are in the middle of the revolution, a revolution that will render the
principles and models of traditional marketing obsolete, a revolution that
will replace traditional feature-and-benefit marketing with experiential
marketing”.
Researchers consider different approaches for defining customer experience.
First, the holistic experience approach includes a person as opposed to a
customer as a whole in every interaction between the company and the
customer (LaSalle & Britton, 2003); second, the memorability of the staged
events (Pine & Gilmore, 1999) which is questionable because this approach
does not take into account the constructive, co-creative role of the consumer;
and third, the experience co-creation approach (Prahalad & Ramaswamy,
2004) which implies that companies do not sell experience according to Pine
and Gilmore’s perspective experiences, but rather they provide a platform
of experiences that can be employed by consumers to co-create their own,
unique, experiences (Carù & Cova, 2003, 2007).
Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004) view the customers as co-creators
of their own experiences. The authors also claim that customers judge a
company’s offering, not by its features, but by the extent to which it gives
207
The Marketing Review, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 3
208
TABLE 1 Definitions of experience
Author Year Definitions
Maslow 1968 Defined peak experience as “…moments of the highest happiness and
fulfilment” (p.73). In the peak experience one can feel his/her true
identity as Maslow (1968) stated that “In moments like this we feel
more powerful than usual and experience unusual focus, joy, intensity,
creativity, in other words being more fully human” (p.72).
Csikszentmihalyi 1977 The individual is experiencing flow when he has “a unified flowing from
one moment to the next, in which he is in control of his actions and in
which there is little distinction between self and environment, between
stimulus and response, between past, present and future” (p.36).
Holbrook &
Hirschman
1982 Experience is defined as a personal occurrence, often with important
emotional significance, founded on the interaction with stimuli which
are the products or services consumed as cited in Carù & Cova (2003).
Csikszentmihalyi 1990 Flow is a state of experience which is characterized by an experience of
intense concentration and enjoyment.
Arnould & Price 1993 An extraordinary experience is characterized by a high level of emotional
intensity, and is triggered by an unusual event.
Carbone &
Haeckel, 1994
1994 “The take-away impression formed by people’s encounters with
products, services, and businesses, a perception produced when
humans consolidate sensory information” (p.8).
Pine & Gilmore 1999 From a business perspective: “experiences are events that engage
individuals in a personal way” (p.12).
Schmitt 1999 From a customer perspective: “Experiences involve the entire living
being. They often result from direct observation and/or participating in
the event - whether they are real, dreamlike or virtual” (p.60).
Robinette et al. 2002 “The collection of points at which companies and consumers exchange
sensory stimuli, information, and emotion” (p.60).
Shaw and Ivens 2002 “An interaction between an organization and a customer. It is a blend
of an organization’s physical performance, the senses stimulated
and emotions evoked, each intuitively measured against customer
experience across all moments of contact” (p.6).
Meyer &
Schwager
2007 “The internal and subjective response that customers have of any direct
or indirect contact with a company. Direct contact generally occurs in
the course of purchase, use and service, and is usually initiated by the
customer. Indirect contact most often involves unplanned encounters
with representatives of a company’s products, services, or brands
and takes the form of word-of-mouth recommendations or criticisms,
advertising, news reports and reviews” (p.2).
Gentile et al. 2007 “The customer experience originates from a set of interactions between
a customer and a product, a company, or part of its organization, which
provoke a reaction. This experience is strictly individual and implies the
customer’s involvement at different levels (rational, emotional, sensorial,
physical and spiritual). Its evaluation depends on the comparison
between a customer’s expectations and the stimuli coming from the
interaction with the company and its offering in correspondence of the
different moments of contacts or touch-points” (p.397).
Authors 2011 Emotions provoked, sensations felt, knowledge gained and skills
acquired through active involvement with the firm pre, during and post
consumption.
Ismail, Melewar, Lim & Woodside Customer experiences with brands
them the experiences they want. This argument suggests that experiences are
distinct offerings. As a result, Carù and Cova (2007) identified a “continuum
of consuming experiences” ranging from experiences that are mainly
constructed by the consumers, to experiences that are largely developed
by companies (a kind of approach which is close to Pine and Gilmore’s
viewpoint), passing through experiences that are co-created by consumers
and companies (as per Prahalad and Ramaswamy) as cited in Gentile, Spiller
and Noci (2007).
In sum, the characteristics of experience as an economic offering, that
is, a great experience, are: first, memorable (Pine & Gilmore, 1999), however,
enabling the customer to live outstanding moments of the relationships with
the company is more valuable for the customer rather than selling a memorable
experience; second, inherently unique and “extraordinary” (LaSalle & Britton,
2003); third, engaging all the customer senses on a personal level (Schmitt,
1999, 2003); fourth, deliberately designed by the provider and focusing
around the customer and performing the physical and social interaction
(Gupta & Vajic, 2000); fifth, experience is subjective in nature, that every
individual puts into play his/her competencies, knowledge, skills, and so
on, to construct the subjective experience and to integrate the resources
offered by the market; and last, the production of emotions is a common
denominator in experience (Gentile et al., 2007; Meyer & Schwager, 2007;
Shaw & Ivens, 2002) and emotional experience or emotion is the heart of the
consumption experience. Addis and Holbrook (2001, p. 50) call for focusing
on the roles of emotions in behaviour - the fact that consumers are feelers
as well as thinkers and doers, the significance of symbolism in consumption,
the consumer’s need for fun and pleasure, and the roles of consumers -
beyond the act of purchase - in product usage as well as brand choice. The
emotional arousal may be the major motivation for consumption of certain
product classes such as novels, plays and sporting events (Hirschman, 1982).
Dimensionality of customer experience
This section makes an attempt to study various dimensions of customer
experience. The following section reviews a number of studies during 1982-
2007. Each of these studies represents a different point of view about
experience configurations.
The “multiaspect” conceptualisation of experience can be traced back to
Holbrook and Hirschman (1982) when they conceptualise the consumption
experience under the heading of “fantasies, feelings, and fun”. Afterwards, a
study focused on customer experiences of river rafting (Arnould & Price, 1993)
and identified three aspects of customer experience; harmony with nature,
“communitas” and personal growth and renewal. Arnould and Price (1993)
apply different research methods ranging from focus groups to observation
over a seven-month period and the sample comprised participants and
guides of the river rafting adventure. However, the authors claim that the
findings may have implications for a broad array of services and consumption
activities but could not generalise beyond the sample studied.
Otto and Ritchie (1996) offer another attempt to measure the construct
of service experience across the tourism industry (airlines, hotels, tours
and attractions). The term “service experience” relates to a number of
contributory events and a number of transactions or interactions between
209
The Marketing Review, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 3
a customer and a provider in the exchange of the service (Czepiel, 1990).
However, the study of Otto and Ritchie (1996) is incomplete, in the sense that
content validity, dimensionality, internal reliability of the service experience
scales, and a factor analysis were completed but tests such as validity and
reliability were not addressed. This research by Otto and Ritchie (1996)
identifies six dimensions of service experience: hedonic, novelty, stimulation,
safety, comfort and interactive. The first three dimensions are consistent
with the experiential benefits described by Bello and Etzel (1985), Havlena
and Holbrook (1986) and Holbrook and Hirschman (1982), as cited in Otto
and Ritchie, (1996). The safety dimension follows from Maslow’s hierarchy
of needs, while comfort is a fundamental benefit of the service encounter.
Later, the six dimensions of service experience were narrowed down to four
dimensions; hedonic, feeling of escape, peace of mind and recognition
(Otto & Ritchie, 1996). Finally, O’Sullivan and Spangler (1998) claim that the
experience construct is complex and can be measured along a continuum
which incorporates real to virtual, novelty or communality, degree of mass-
production or customisation, and level of interaction with other people.
In an operational view of experiential marketing, Pine and Gilmore (1999)
define four realms of a consumption experience. They describe two main
dimensions: first, the level of guest participation, passive or active; second,
environmental relationship absorption or immersion between customer
and occurrence. Connecting these dimensions defines the four areas of
experience: entertainment, education, aestheticism and escape.
Although Pine and Gilmore (1999) introduce and develop this framework
to understand the nature of customer experience in general, their report lacks
a detailed analysis of these dimensions and its measurements and similarly
there is a lack of sufficient research to measure these concepts. Exceptionally,
there is one recent attempt by Oh, Fiore and Jeoung (2007), a study that
aimed at developing an initial measurement scale of the tourist’s destination
lodging experiences. The researchers operationalised and tested the four
realms of experience using customers’ lodging experiences with rural bed
and breakfasts. Additionally, the study introduced some relevant theoretical
variables such as arousal, memories, overall quality and customer satisfaction
(Oh et al., 2007). However, this study focuses only on one minor part in the
service sector.
Extending and supporting the work in this nascent area of research,
Poulsson and Kale (2004) claimed that there is no clear differentiation
between what they called the commercial experience discussed by Pine
and Gilmore (1999) and other kinds of experiences encountered on a
daily basis. Thus, they pose the question of what are the ingredients of a
commercial experience that are most likely to provide product differentiation
and a competitive advantage. Therefore, they advocate five elements for a
successful experience – personal relevance, novelty, surprise, learning, and
engagement dimensions – to be the constituents of a successful experience
through structured interviews with ten experience providers across a range
of industries – gaming, rock climbing gyms, theme parks, museums, hot air
balloon rides (Poulsson & Kale, 2004).
O’Loughlin, Szmigin and Turnbull (2004) conceptualise customer
experience within the Irish financial services as brand experience, transactional
210
Ismail, Melewar, Lim & Woodside Customer experiences with brands
experience and relationship experience: first, brand experience is the perceived
experience at the corporate brand level by both consumer and managers
as representing corporate values and brand image; second, transactional
experience which varies from purely functional to personal depending on
the nature of the product and the channel used; third, relational experience
which represents the experience of having a relationship with the company
over time. More recently, Mascarenhas, Kesevan and Bernacchi (2006)
asserted that total customer experience encompasses both physical and
emotional elements. They argued that experiences are customer-dependent
and context-specific.
Gentile et al. (2007) conceptualise customer experience as a
multidimensional structure and its components are as follows: (1) a sensorial
component, a component of the customer experience, the stimulation of
which affects the senses, i.e. sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, so as
to arouse esthetical pleasure, excitement, satisfaction, and sense of beauty;
(2) an emotional component, this involves the customer’s affective system
through the generation of moods, feelings and emotions; (3) a cognitive
component, this is connected with thinking processes, or engaging
customers through using their creativity in problem solving; (4) a pragmatic
component which includes the practical act of doing something, thus, the
concept of usability does not only refer to the use of the product in the
post-purchase stage, but it extends to all the product life-cycle stages; (5) a
lifestyle component, in this component of experience, the product itself and
its consumption or use become a means of adhesion to certain values the
company and the brand symbolise and to which the customers contribute;
(6) a relational component, a component of the customer experience that
involves the person, consumption or use of a product with other people.
Finally, in a recent article in the Journal of Marketing, Brakus, Schmitt and
Zarantonello (2009) identified four factors of experience (sensorial, affective,
behavioural and intellectual); in sum, with a plethora of different definitions
and dimensions of customer experience which may be an umbrella construct
with distinct dimensions. However, no real consensus yet exists as to what
these dimensions might be.
Scholars recognise many types of experience, such as experience
economy (Pine & Gilmore, 1999), extraordinary experiences (Arnould & Price,
1993), flow experience for artists, athletes and dancers (Csikszentmihalyi,
1977), peak experience which was established as a central phenomenon
in humanistic psychology by Maslow (1964, 1968), relationship experience
in co-creating brands (Payne, Storbacka & Frow, 2008), the sport customer
experience (Miller & Johnson, 2008), service experience (Otto & Richie, 1996;
Winsted, 1997), pre-purchase service experience (Edvardsson, Enquist &
Johnston, 2005), the retail experience (Backstrom & Johansson, 2006; Rowley
& Slack, 1999), the experience of heritage tourists (Beeho & Prentice, 1997;
Masberg & Silverman, 1996), the VIP tent experience (Pullman & Gross,
2004), Transcendent Customer Experience (TCE) (Schouten, McAlexander &
Koenig, 2007), leisure experience (Lengkeek, 2001), recreation experience
(Hull, Stewart & Yi, 1992), place experience (Clarke & Schmidt, 1995; Trauer
& Ryan, 2005), tourist experience (Uriely, 2005), backpacking experiences
(Uriely, Yonay & Simchai, 2002), tourism experience (Quan & Wang, 2004)
and the dining experience (Andersson & Mossberg, 2004).
211
The Marketing Review, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 3
This paper attempts to shed light on a particular kind of experience in
which customers interact with brands and how such interactions impact
brand loyalties. In particular, experiential service brands are of interest
that are characterised by higher levels of employee contact, customisation
directed toward people, and with a strong people orientation (Stafford &
Day, 1995). In addition, experiential brands focus on consumer interaction
with a company’s product or services (Dea, Hemerling & Rhodes, et al.,
1998). Specifically, the service sector was considered a good place to examine
because of the close relationship between the customers and the brand
that exists in the service sector (Franzen, 1999) and usually firms attempt to
strengthen this relationship with their consumers (Randall, 1997).
Because services are intangible, consumers are more likely to use cues to
reduce risk of purchasing services and infer service quality (Murray & Schlacter,
1990; Olson, 1977). Consumers use a number of important cues to judge
the quality of a service prior to consumption, such as price, brand name,
advertising and word-of-mouth. Similarly, these cues were hypothesised
in this paper as important and reliable sources of information on which
212
TABLE 2 Dimensions of Customer Experience
Authors Year Context No Dimensions
Holbrook &
Hirschman
1982 Conceptual article 3 Fantasies, feelings and fun.
Arnould & Price 1993 River rafting 3 Harmony with nature, communitas
and personal growth and renewal.
Otto & Ritchie 1996 Tourism industry
(airlines, hotels, tours
and attractions)
6 Hedonic, novelty, stimulation, safety,
comfort and interactive.
O’Sullivan &
Spangler
1998 Conceptual article 4 Real to virtual, novelty or
communality, degree of mass-
production or customisation, and
level of interaction with other people.
Pine & Gilmore 1999 Conceptual 4 Entertainment, education,
aestheticism and escape.
Poulsson & Kale 2004 A range of industries;
gaming, rock climbing
gyms, theme parks,
museums, hot air
balloon rides, etc
5 Personal relevance, novelty, surprise,
learning, and engagement.
O’Loughlin et al. 2004 Irish financial services 3 Brand experience, transactional
experience and relationship
experience.
Mascarenhas et al. 2006 Conceptual 2 Physical and emotional elements.
Gentile et al. 2007 A study on some
widely-known brands
5 A sensorial, an emotional, a cognitive,
a pragmatic, a lifestyle, and a
relational component.
Brakus et al. 2009 An empirical study on
a variety of brands
4 Behavioral, sensorial, intellectual and
affective.
Ismail, Melewar, Lim & Woodside Customer experiences with brands
customers rely to predict and evaluate their experiences, as intangibility is not
only limited to services, but experiences are also intangible. The next section
discusses the propositions.
Antecedents to customer experience in services
On the basis of the reviewed literature, a set of antecedents is likely to
influence customer experience (as Figure 1 shows). Also, perceived service
quality is likely to be a unique input to customer experience; perceived service
quality is likely to have a direct relationship to brand loyalty.
Reeves and Bednar (1994) depict perceived service quality as the extent of
discrepancy between the customers’ expectations and their perceptions. The
marketing literature identifies service quality as an antecedent to outcomes
such as customer satisfaction (Grönroos, 2001). Service researchers view
perceived service quality to be a prerequisite for loyalty and frequently include
loyalty in models as an outcome variable (e.g. Gremler & Brown, 1996).
Therefore, the study here includes the hypothesis that a positive relationship
exists between service quality and brand loyalty. Also, service quality has a
directional relationship to the overall experience as an input to the real-time
213
FIGURE 1 The conceptual framework
H11
H10
H8
H7b
H7a
H6b
H6a
H5b
H5a
H3
H2
Brand name
Advertising
Price
Employees
Servicescape
Core service
WOM
Customer
ex
p
erience
Perceived
Service
q
ualit
y
Brand loyalty
H1
H4
The Marketing Review, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 3
experience (Knutson & Beck, 2003). Consequently, the following hypotheses
are made.
H1 Perceived service quality has a positive effect on customer experience.
Intangible service benefits can be communicated effectively by linking them
to consumers’ life experiences (Mittal, 1999). The real challenge of service
advertising, then, is how to capture these subjective experiences effectively.
Mittal (1999) suggested that to capture subjective experiences effectively
the advertisement ought to be vivid, realistic, and vicariously rewarding.
Vicariously rewarding here means that the life experiences are nontrivial,
positive and motivational.
Advertisements raise customers’ expectations by making promises about
a product or service. When those promises are not kept, customers have a
poor experience. Therefore, when advertising raises customer expectations the
customer experience must go beyond expectations in order to deliver a great
customer experience. Good experience offers a brilliantly simple summary of
the relationship between advertising and customer experience. If companies
are pouring money into advertising and raising their customers’ expectations,
but they do not match their investment in customer experience, it would
follow that they risk investing in delivering a poor customer experience.
H2 Advertising has a significant effect on customer experience during
the service consumption.
Price perhaps is the most intangible element in the marketing mix and typically
there is little sensory experience linked to the price variable (Evans, Moutinho
& Raaij, 1996). The customer perception of price is more important than
the actual price (Monroe, 1973). Price perception is concerned with how
price information is comprehended by customers and made meaningful to
them (Evans et al., 1996). Price is also a cue often used by customers to
make patronage decisions, to determine what to expect, and to evaluate
the quality of a service relative to how much they paid. Customers use
price as a good proxy for quality when they have insufficient information
about the quality (Evans et al., 1996). In fact, a considerable number of
consumer research studies examine what information cues consumers used
most often when evaluating products. The findings indicate that consumers
most often rely on price (Zeithaml, Berry & Parasuraman, 1993). An inference
has been made that customers may use price as an indicator of experience
and price perception is a means through which a customer sets a bundle of
expectations that he/she needs to be fulfilled.
H3 Price perception of services has a significant effect on customer
experience during the service consumption.
Prior work highlights the impact of customer contact employees on the
perception of service quality (Bitner, Booms & Tetreault, 1990; Farrell, Souchon
& Durden, 2001). Employee behaviour would affect customers in terms of
interaction with the firm (Winsted, 2000). Several pieces of research focus on
the interaction that takes place between the customer and personnel during
service encounters and consider creating consumer satisfaction and service
214
Ismail, Melewar, Lim & Woodside Customer experiences with brands
quality to be essential (Grönroos, 2001). Consumers report store personnel to
be a contributing factor to entertaining store experiences especially when the
staff has the ability to provide extraordinary service experience (Jones, 1999).
Furthermore, employees are often pointed out as being a major antecedent
of the customer’s interpretations of their experiences with services, and are
often associated with the consistency of the service quality delivered (de
Chernatony & McDonald, 1998; Grönroos, 2001).
H4a Employee performance has a significant effect on customer
experience during service consumption.
H4b Employee performance relates positively to perceived service quality.
H4c Perceived service quality mediates the impact of employees on
customer experience.
Atmospherics or servicescape is the area that receives the most research
attention. Atmospherics relate to factors in the store environment that are
designable to create certain emotional and behavioural responses by the
consumer (Kotler, 1973). The servicescape may have either a positive or
negative influence on the experience outcome. Office décor, car parking,
the building’s design, appearance of the reception area are important
influencers of brand associations as those factors are often the customer’s
first interaction with the service firm (McDonald, de Chernatony & Harris,
2001; Yoo, Donthu & Lee, 2000).
Definitions of store atmosphere vary from exclusively including subtle
aspects, such as music (Yalch & Spangenberg, 1990) to also including
aspects of the physical environment that constitutes the store, such as store
decorations (Hoffman & Turley, 2002). Hoffman and Turley (2002, p. 35)
give a holistic view of the concept, “Atmospherics are composed of both
tangible elements (the building, carpeting, fixtures, and point-of-purchase
decorations) and intangible elements (colours, music, temperature, scents)
that comprise service experiences”.
A positive atmosphere can lead to approach behaviour, which implies
that consumers stay longer in the store, spend more money or that the
propensity for impulse buying increases (Foxall & Greenley, 2000). Some
even relate atmospherics to the possibility of creating long-lasting consumer
relationships (Babin & Attaway, 2000). Conversely, a negative atmosphere
leads to avoidance behaviour, such as a desire to leave the store or a sense of
dissatisfaction (Donovan & Rossiter, 1982; Turley & Milliman, 2000).
Thus, perceived service quality is likely to partially mediate the direct
impact of servicescape on customer experience. The emotions provoked and
the subjective feelings the customer has due to the setting effect are likely to
contribute to customer experience. Therefore,
H5a Servicescape or setting influences customer experience during
service consumption.
H5b Servicescape influences perceived service quality.
H5c Perceived service quality mediates the impact of servicescape on
customer experience.
215
The Marketing Review, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 3
A core service is the reason why the service firm exists in the market. Sasser,
Olsen and Wyckoff (1978) as cited in (Palmer, 1994) identifies core service to
be substantive service, that is, the essential function of a service. Core service
quality across different types of services such as dental services, auto services,
restaurants and hairstylists directly affects customer satisfaction (McDougall
& Levesque, 2000 cited in Grace & O’Cass, 2004). Core service in the present
paper likely directly affects service quality and customer experience; in
addition, it is hypothesised that perceived service quality plays a mediating
role between core service and customer experience. The rationale is that
customer assessment of his/her experience will, in part, be on the basis
of perceived service quality which undoubtedly is an outcome of the core
service experience.
H6a Customers’ interpretations of core service influence customer
experience during service consumption.
H6b Core service has a significant effect on perceived service quality.
H6c Perceived service quality mediates the impact of core service on
customer experience.
Because of the experiential nature of services, word-of-mouth (WOM)
communications are viewed as more reliable and trustworthy. Word-of-mouth
is the means by which customers exchange information about services, thus
diffusing information about a product throughout a market. Grönroos (1990,
p. 158) describes WOM as “the message about an organisation, its credibility
and trustworthiness, its way of operating and its services, communicated
from one person to another”.
Research examines WOM both as an input into consumer decision-making
(Feick & Price, 1987) and an outcome of the purchase process (Richins, 1983).
The content of WOM affects purchase decisions either positively (Richins,
1983), or negatively (Bolfing, 1989). In sum, WOM is a powerful source of
influence assisting the customer to predict the consumption experience.
H7 Word-of-mouth positively influences customer experience during
the service consumption.
Mood is a mild, pervasive, and generalised affective state, rather than intense
emotions (Mattila & Wirtz, 2000). A positive mood in general seems to lead
to more positive evaluations, including more positive consumer satisfaction
judgments (Mano & Oliver, 1993). Conversely, a person in a bad mood will
perceive the service consumption experience in a more negative way (Mattila
& Wirtz, 2000). Negative affective states are related to negatively-toned
cognitions such that the consumer is likely to evaluate the experience as
worse than expected (Babin, Darden, University & Babin, 1998). In addition,
“customers who are in a bad mood possibly pay more attention to uncivil
employee behaviour” (Liljander & Mattson 2002, p. 855). Therefore, we
hypothesise:
H8 Customer pre-consumption mood positively influences customer
experience during the service consumption.
216
Ismail, Melewar, Lim & Woodside Customer experiences with brands
Consequences of Customer Experience
In essence, an outstanding customer experience affects brand loyalty. Brand
loyalty is the attachment that a customer has to brand and in this study
brand loyalty has been treated as the final dependent variable. A customer
loyal to a brand is less likely to switch to another brand. The loyal customer is
more profitable for the company rather than acquiring a new one for several
reasons: the loyal customer is less sensitive to price, spends more with the
company in addition to his/her serving cost being less (Berry & Parasuraman,
1991; Tepeci, 1999).
Chaudhuri and Holbrook (2001, p. 82) define brand loyalty as
a deeply held commitment to re-buy or re-patronise a preferred product
or service consistently in the future, thereby causing repetitive same-
brand set purchasing, despite situational influences and marketing efforts
having the potential to cause switching behaviour.
This definition underscores two principal elements of brand loyalty:
behavioural aspects; and attitudinal aspects (Aaker, 1991; Oliver, 1999).
Behavioural loyalty refers to those aspects of consumer behaviour directed
towards a particular brand over time, in other words, repeated purchases
of a brand (Rundle-Thiele & Mackay, 2001). The current study is seeking
to measure attitudinal brand loyalty because of its importance in driving
behaviour and because attitudinal loyalty is more enduring.
In the current study and in accordance with the customer experience
literature which asserted that customer experience affects loyalty behaviour
(Barsky & Nash, 2002; Berry et al., 2002), the researchers argue that well-
orchestrated experience by companies is deemed to be a major contribution
to creating brand loyalty. In other words, positive experience affects a
customer’s brand loyalty.
H9 Perceived service quality positively contributes to brand loyalty.
H10 Customer experience will positively contribute to brand loyalty.
Summary and future research
The paper clarifies understanding of the critical topic “customer experience”
and highlights the different definitions and point of views of the concept.
Also, research to capture the true meaning of the concept has been presented,
in an attempt to address the question of what are the underlying dimensions
constituting the construct of customer experience. Furthermore, the present
paper provides a general framework for building an exceptional customer
experience in the experiential services from the consumer perspective. The
theoretical propositions here focus on causal paths and configurations
among the different constructs that influence customer experience and in
turn brand loyalty. Although the conceptual research model is not empirically
tested and validated, the propositions and the integrative framework provide
a foundation to direct future research for empirically testing the research
model in multiple contexts.
217
The Marketing Review, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 3
By managing customer experience, firms drive brand awareness, secure
customer loyalty, and ultimately increase profits. If the firm (or non-profit
organisation) fails to deliver a great customer experience, it will struggle in
the marketplace and that struggle results in high customer churn. Customers
who do not return tell others about their bad or humdrum experiences.
Therefore, managers need to be attentive to the importance of customer
experience and attempt to create loyal customer advocates in order to
experience more profitable business growth.
The topic is important because in the last decades, providing good
service to customers is insufficient for sustaining brand loyalty and creating
competitive advantage (Berry et al., 2002; MacMillan & McGrath, 1997;
Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004; Schembri, 2006). Customer experience
has been claimed to affect loyalty behaviour (Barsky & Nash, 2002; Berry
et al., 2002). A few firms have properly adopted the customer-experience
perspective but most firms fail to do so because the literature lacks an
integrative theoretical framework to address this research problem (Gentile
et al., 2007). Accordingly, future research should test and validate the
customer-brand experience theory in different contexts and different types
of businesses.
Best practice in research methodologies for investigating/measuring
customer experience
Experience is something singular that happens to an individual which
researchers cannot access directly (Carù & Cova, 2008). Therefore, the
methodologies typically in use to research experiences, such as interviews
and focus groups, have a number of drawbacks (Elliott & Jankel-Elliott,
2003). Ethnography of consumption has, in just a few years, become a
major qualitative research strategy, given the limitations of questionnaire-
driven verbatims and other kinds of interviews (Mariampolski, 1999, 2005)
when it came to understand the deep feelings and emotions experienced by
consumers (Carù & Cova, 2008).
Ethnography has been used to cover such experiences since the shift
from a researcher-devised retrospective narrative in an interview form to
an introspective narrative that is produced, fine-tuned and diffused by the
consumer in the shape of a text diary, audio diary or video diary (Carù & Cova,
2008). This decentred practice, which turns consumers into active producers
of their experiences’ narratives, is rooted in the rise of so-called “self-reflexive”
individuals (Carù & Cova, 2008). Individual reflexivity is what enables them
to tell their stories and to explain their actions using words. In the late
1990s, Kozinets developed “netnography” as an online marketing research
technique for providing consumer insight. It is an adaptation and expansion
of ethnographic methods to online formats which is broadly based on the
reflexive narratives that people publish online (Kozinets, 1997, 1998, 2001,
2002). Kozinets (2002) has defined netnography in terms of both product
and process. As a product, a netnography is “a written account of online
cyberculture, informed by the methods of cultural anthropology” (Kozinets,
1997, p. 470). As a process or research methodology, netnography is a
“new qualitative research methodology that adapts ethnographic research
218
Ismail, Melewar, Lim & Woodside Customer experiences with brands
techniques to study the cultures and communities that are emerging through
computer-mediated communications” (Kozinets, 2002, p. 62).
We propose that netnography could have been applied as a marketing
research technique to identify and understand customer experiences as
Internet access became more widely available. People have come to adopt
it as yet another medium with which they can chronicle their lives, with
the added dimension that they now have an audience. In addition, the
netnography research method will be able to develop “a ‘thick description’
of the lived experience of consumers” (Elliott & Jankel-Elliot, 2003, p. 215).
In addition to a purely qualitative netnography method, we argue that
the pluralistic research, which has gained popularity in marketing research
in recent decades, could be used to investigate the unknown domain of
customer experience. Therefore, a quantitative study is preferred for this
investigation using a self-administered questionnaire to measure each of the
constructs of concern. This approach is extremely useful in helping researchers
to understand the hedonic and subjective dimension of the consumption
experience and then future research would be encouraged to empirically test
the research model in different contexts. The researchers have already used
the mixed method approach, starting with the netnography phase and then
a self-administered questionnaire in a second quantitative phase, and the
results, which will be published in a different paper, have come to meet our
expectations.
References
Aaker, D.A. (1991). Managing brand equity: Capitalising on the value of a brand
name. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Addis, M., & Holbrook, M.B. (2001). On the conceptual link between mass
customization and experiential consumption: An explosion of subjectivity.
Journal of Consumer Behavior, 1(1), 50-66. Chicago, IL: American Marketing
Association.
Andersson, T.D., & Mossberg, L. (2004). The dining experience: Do restaurants satisfy
customer needs? Food Service Technology, 4, 171-177.
Arnould, E., & Price, L. (1993). River magic: Extraordinary experiences and the
extended service encounter. Journal of Consumer Research, 20, 24-45.
Arvidsson, A. (2005). Brands: A critical perspective. Journal of Consumer Culture,
5(2), 235-259.
Arvidsson, A. (2006). Brands: Meaning and value in media culture. London: Routledge.
Babin, B.J., & Attaway, J.S. (2000). Atmospheric as tool for creating value and gaining
share of customer. Journal of Business Research, 49, 91-99.
Babin, B.J., Darden, W.R., University, L.S., & Babin, B.A. (1998). Negative emotions in
marketing research: Affect or artefact? Journal of Business Research, 42, 271-
285.
Backstrom, K., & Johansson, U. (2006). Creating and consuming experiences in retail
store environments: Comparing retailer and consumer perspectives. Journal of
Retailing and Consumer Services, 13, 417-430.
Barsky, J., & Nash, L. (2002). Evoking emotion: Affective keys to hotel loyalty. Cornell
Hotel & Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 43, 39.
Beeho, A.J., & Prentice, R.C. (1997). Conceptualizing the experiences of heritage
tourists. Tourism Management, 18(2), 75-87.
219
The Marketing Review, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 3
Bello, D.C., & Etzel, M.J. (1985). The role of novelty in the pleasure travel experience.
Journal of Travel Research, 24(1), 20-26.
Berry, L.L., Carbone, L.P., & Haeckel, S.H. (2002). Managing the total customer
experience. MIT Sloan Management Review, 43(3), 85-89.
Berry, L.L., & Parasuraman, A. (1991). Marketing services – competing through
quality. New York: Free Press.
Bitner, M., Booms, B., & Tetreault, M. (1990). The service encounter: diagnosing
favourable and unfavourable incidents. Journal of Marketing, 54(January), 71-
84.
Bolfing, C.P. (1989). How do customers express dissatisfaction and what can service
marketers do about it? Journal of Services Marketing, 3(2), 5-23.
Brakus, J., Schmitt, B., & Zarantonello, L. (2009). Brand experience: What is it? How
is it measured? Does it affect loyalty? Journal of Marketing, 73(May), 52-68.
Carbone, L.P., & Haeckel, S.H. (1994). Engineering customer experiences. Marketing
Management, 3(3), 9-19.
Carù, A., & Cova, B. (2003). Revisiting consumption experience: A more humble but
complete view of the concept. Marketing Theory, 3(2), 267-286.
Carù, A., & Cova, B. (Eds.) (2007). Consuming experience. Oxford: Routledge.
Carù, A., & Cova, B. (2008). Small versus big stories in framing consumption
experiences. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 11(2), 166-
176.
Chaudhari, A., & Holbrook, M.B. (2001). The chain of effects from brand trust
and brand affect to brand performance: The role of brand loyalty. Journal of
Marketing, 65(April), 81-93.
Clarke, I., & Schmidt, R. (1995). Beyond the servicescape: The experience of place.
Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2(3), 149-162.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1977). Beyond boredom and anxiety (Second printing). San
Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York:
Harper and Row.
Czepiel, J.A. (1990). Service encounters and service relationships. Journal of Business
Research, 20(1), 13-21.
Dea, J.T., Hemerling, J.W., & Rhodes, D. (1998). Living the brand. Banking Strategies,
(November), 47-56.
de Chernatony, L., & McDonald, M. (1998). Creating Powerful Brands in Consumer
Service and Industrial Markets. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Donovan, R.J., & Rossiter J.R. (1982). Store atmosphere: An environmental psychology
approach. Journal of Retailing, 58(1), 34-57.
Edvardsson, B., Enquist, B., & Johnston, B. (2005). Co-creating customer value
through hyperreality in the pre-purchase service experience. Journal of Service
Research, 8(2), 149-161.
Elliott, R., & Jankel-Elliott, N. (2003). Using ethnography in strategic consumer
research. Qualitative Market Research, 6(4), 215-223.
Evans, M.J., Moutinho, L., & Raaij, F.V. (1996). Applied consumer behaviour. Harlow:
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
Farrell, A.M., Souchon, A.L., & Durden, G.R. (2001). Service encounter
conceptualisation: Employees’ service behaviours and customers’ service quality
perceptions. Journal of Marketing Management, 17, 577-593.
Feick, L.F., & Price, L.L. (1987). The market maven: A diffuser of marketplace
information. Journal of Marketing, 51, 83-97.
Foxall, G.R., & Greenley, G.E. (2000). Predicting and explaining responses to consumer
environments: an empirical test and theoretical extension of the behavioural
perspective model. The Service Industries Journal, 20(2), 39-63.
Franzen, G. (1999). Brands & advertising: How advertising effectiveness influences
brand equity. Oxfordshire, UK: Admap Publication.
220
Ismail, Melewar, Lim & Woodside Customer experiences with brands
Gentile, C., Spiller, N., & Noci, G. (2007). How to sustain the customer experience:
An overview of experience components that co-create value with the customer,
European Management Journal, 25(5), 395-410.
Grace, D., & O’Cass, A. (2004). Examining service experience and postconsumption
evaluations. Journal of Services Marketing, 18(6), 450-461.
Gremler, D.D., & Brown, S.W. (1996). Service loyalty: its nature, importance, and
implications. In B. Edvardsson, (Ed.), Advancing Service Quality: A Global
Perspective (171-180). New York: International Service Quality Association.
Grönroos, C. (1990). Service Management and Marketing: Managing the Moments
of Truth in Service Competition. New York: Lexington Books.
Grönroos, C. (2001). Service management and marketing – A consumer relationship
management approach. Chichester: Wiley.
Gupta, S., & Vajic, M. (2000). The contextual and dialectical nature of experiences. In
J.A. Fitzsimmons & M.J. Fitzsimmons (Eds.), New service development – Creating
memorable experiences (33–51). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Havlena, W.J., & Holbrook, M.B. (1986). The varieties of consumption experience:
Comparing two typologies of emotion in consumer behaviour. Journal of
Consumer Research, 13(December), 394-404.
Hirschman, E.C. (1982). Hedonic consumption: Emerging concepts, methods and
propositions. Journal of Marketing, 46, 92-101.
Hirschman, E.C., & Holbrook, M.B. (1982). Hedonic consumption: Emerging concepts,
methods and propositions. Journal of Marketing, 46(3), 92-101.
Hoffman, K.D., & Turley, L.W. (2002). Atmospherics, service encounters and consumer
decision making: an integrative perspective. Journal of Marketing Theory and
Practice, 10(3), 33-47.
Holbrook, M.B. (2000). The millennial consumer in the texts of our times: Experience
and entertainment. Journal of Macromarketing, 20(2), 178-192.
Holbrook, M., & Hirschman, E. (1982). The experiential aspects of consumption:
Fantasies, feelings, and fun. Journal of Consumer Research, 9, 132-140.
Hull, R.B., Stewart, W.P., & Yi, Y.K. (1992). Experience patterns: Capturing the dynamic
nature of leisure experiences. Leisure Sciences, 16, 298-314.
Jones, M.A. (1999). Entertaining shopping experiences: An exploratory investigation.
Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 6, 129-139.
Keaveney, S.M. (1995). Customer switching behaviour in service industries: An
exploratory study? Journal of Marketing, 59(2), 71-82.
Knutson, B.J., & Beck, J.A. (2003). Identifying the dimensions of the experience
construct: Development of the model. Journal of Quality Assurance in Hospitality
& Tourism, 4(3/4), 23-35.
Kotler, P. (1973). Atmospherics as a marketing tool. Journal of Retailing, 49(Winter),
48-64.
Kozinets, R.V. (1997). ‘I want to believe’: A netnography of the X-philes’ subculture of
consumption. Advances in Consumer Research, 24, 470-475.
Kozinets, R.V. (1998). On netnography. Initial reflections on consumer investigations
of cyberculture. Advances in Consumer Research, Association for Consumer
Research, Provo, UT, 25, 366-371.
Kozinets, R.V. (2001). Utopian enterprise: Articulating the meanings of Star Trek’s
culture of consumption. Journal of Consumer Research, 28, 67-88.
Kozinets, R.V. (2002). The field behind the screen: Using netnography for marketing
research in online communities. Journal of Marketing Research, 34, 61-72.
LaSalle, D., & Britton, T.A. (2003). Priceless: Turning ordinary products into
extraordinary experience. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Lengkeek, J. (2001). Leisure experience and imagination: Rethinking Cohen’s modes
of tourist experience. International Sociology, 16, 173-184.
221
The Marketing Review, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 3
Liljander, V., & Mattsson, J. (2002). Impact of customer pre-consumption mood
on the evaluation of employee behavior in service encounters. Psychology and
Marketing, 19(10), 837-857.
Macmillan, I.C., & McGrath, R.G. (1997). Discovering new points of differentiation.
Harvard Business Review, 75(4), 133-142.
Mano, H., & Oliver, R.L. (1993). Assessing the dimensionality and structure of the
consumption experience: Evaluation, feeling, and satisfaction. Journal of
Consumer Research, 20(December), 451-466.
Mariampolski, H. (1999). The power of ethnography. Journal of the Market Research
Society, 41(1), 75-86.
Mariampolski, H. (2005). Ethnography for marketers: A guide to consumer immersion.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Masberg, B.A., & Silverman, L.H. (1996). Visitor experiences at heritage sites: A
phenomenological approach. Journal of Travel Research, 34(4), 20-28.
Mascarenhas, O.A., Kesavan, R., & Bernacchi, M. (2006). Lasting customer loyalty: A
total customer experience approach. The Journal of Consumer Marketing, 23(7),
397-405.
Maslow, A. (1964). Religions, values, and peak experiences. Columbus, OH: Ohio
State University Press.
Maslow, A. (1968). Toward a Psychology of Being. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand
Reinhold.
Mattila, A., & Wirtz, J. (2000). The role of preconsumption affect in postpurchase
evaluation of services. Psychology & Marketing, 17(7), 587-605.
McDonald, M., de Chernatony, L., & Harris, F. (2001). Corporate marketing and service
brands: Moving beyond the fast-moving consumer goods model. European
Journal of Marketing, 35, 335-353.
McDougall, G.H.G., & Levesque, T. (2000). Customer satisfaction with services:
Putting perceived value into the equation. Journal of Services Marketing, 14(5),
392-410.
Meyer , C., & Schwager, A. (2007). Understanding customer experience. Harvard
Business Review, 85(2), 117-126.
Miller, J.S., & Johnson, S.A. (2008). Double play: Creating the sport customer
experience using an interdisciplinary framework for managing service employees.
Journal of Marketing Management, 24(1-2), 87-112.
Milligan, A., & Smith, S. (2002). Uncommon practice: People who deliver a great
brand experience. Harlow: Prentice Hall.
Mittal, B. (1999). The advertising of services: Meeting the challenge of intangibility.
Journal of Service Research, 2(1), 98-116.
Monroe, K.B. (1973). Buyers’ subjective perceptions of price. Journal of Marketing
Research, 10(February), 73-80.
Murray, K.B., & Schlacter, J.L. (1990). The impact of services versus goods on
consumers’ assessment of perceived risk and variability. Journal of the Academy
of Marketing Science, 18(1), 51-65.
Oh, H., Fiore, A.M., & Jeoung, M. (2007). Measuring experience economy concepts:
Tourism applications. Journal of Travel Research, 46, 119-132.
Oliver, R.L. (1999). Whence consumer loyalty? Journal of Marketing, 63(Special Issue),
33-44.
O’Loughlin, D., Szmigin, I., & Turnbull, P. (2004). From relationships to experiences in
retail financial services. International Journal of Bank Marketing, 22(7), 522-539.
Olson, J.C. (1977). Price as an informational cue: Effects on product evaluations. In
A.Woodside, J.N. Sheth, & P.D. Bennett, (Eds.), Consumer and Industrial Buying
Behavior, (267-286). New York, NY: Elsevier.
O’Sullivan, E., & Spangler, K. (1998). Experience Marketing. State College, PA: Venture.
222
Ismail, Melewar, Lim & Woodside Customer experiences with brands
Otto, E.J., & Ritchie, B.J. (1996). The service experience in tourism. Tourism
Management, 17(3), 165-174.
Palmer, A., 1994. Principles of Services Marketing. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Payne, A.F., Storbacka, K., & Frow, P. (2008). Managing the co-creation of value.
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36(1), 83-96.
Pine, B.J., & Gilmore, J.H. (1999). The Experience Economy: Work is theatre and every
business a stage. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Ponsonby-McCabe, S., & Boyle, E. (2006). Understanding brands as experiential
spaces: Axiological implications for marketing strategists. Journal of Strategic
Marketing, 14(2), 175-189.
Poulsson S.H., & Kale, H.S. (2004). The experience economy and commercial
experiences. Marketing Review, 4, 267-277.
Prahalad, C.K., & Ramaswamy, V. (2004). Co-creation experiences: The next practice
in value creation. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 18(3), 5-14.
Pullman, M.E., & Gross, M.A. (2004). Ability of experience design elements to elicit
emotions and loyalty behaviours. Decision Sciences, 35(3), 551-578.
Quan, S., & Wang, N. (2004). Towards a structural model of the tourist experience:
An illustration from food experiences in tourism. Tourism Management, 25(3),
297-305.
Randall, G. (1997). Do Your Own Market Research. London: Kogan Page.
Reeves, V., & Bednar, D. (1994). Defining quality: alternatives and implications.
Academy of Management Review, 19(3), 419-45.
Reichheld, F., & Sasser, W.E. (1990). Zero defections: quality comes to services.
Harvard Business Review, 68(September-October), 105-111.
Richins, M. (1983). Negative word-of-mouth by dissatisfied customers: A pilot study.
Journal of Marketing, 47, 68-78.
Robinette, S., Brand, C., & Lenz, V. (2002). Emotion Marketing: The hallmark way of
winning customers for life. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Rowley, J., & Slack, F. (1999). The retail experience in airport departure lounges:
Reaching for timelessness and placelessness. International Marketing Review,
16, 363-375.
Runde-Thiele, S., & Mackay, M. (2001). Assessing the performance of brand loyalty
measures. Journal of Services Marketing, 15(7), 529-546.
Sasser, W.E., Olsen, R.P., & Wyckoff, D.D. (1978). Management of Service Operations.
Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Schembri, S. (2006). Rationalizing service logic, or understanding services as
experience? Marketing Theory, 6, 381-392.
Schmitt, B.H. (1999). Experiential Marketing. New York: Library of Congress
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.
Schmitt, B.H. (2003). Customer experience management. A revolutionary approach
to connecting with your customers. New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Schouten, J.W., McAlexander, J.H., & Koenig, H.F. (2007). Transcendent customer
experience and brand community. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science,
35, 357-368.
Shaw, C., & Ivens, J. (2002). Building great customer experiences. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Smith, S., & Wheeler, J. (2002). Managing the Customer Experience: Turning
customers into advocates. London: Prentice Hall.
Spreng, R.A., MacKenzie, S.B., & Olshavsky, R.W. (1996). A re-examination of the
determinants of consumer satisfaction. Journal of Marketing, 6(July), 15-32.
Stafford, M., & Day, E. (1995). Retail services advertising: The effects of appeal,
medium and service. Journal of Advertising, 24, 57-72.
Tepeci, M. (1999). Increasing brand loyalty in the hospitality industry. International
Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 11, 223-229.
223
Toffler, A. (1970). Future Shock. New York: Bantam.
Trauer, B.B., & Ryan, C. (2005). Destination image, romance and place experience - An
application of intimacy theory in tourism. Tourism Management, 26(4), 481-491.
Turley, L.W., & Milliman, R.E. (2000). Atmospheric effects on shopping behavior: A
review of the experimental evidence. Journal of Business Research, 49(2), 193-
211.
Uriely, N. (2005). The tourist experience - Conceptual developments. Annals of
Tourism Research, 32, 199-216.
Uriely, N., Yonay, Y., & Simchai, D. (2002). Backpacking experiences: A type and form
analysis. Annals of Tourism Research, 29, 520-538.
Vandenbosch, M., & Dawar, N. (2002). Beyond better products: Capturing value in
customer interactions. MIT Sloan Management Review, 43(4), 35-42.
Vargo, S.L., & Lusch, R.F. (2004). The four service marketing myths - Remnants of a
goods-based, manufacturing model. Journal of Service Research, 6(4), 324-35.
Westbrook, R.A., & Oliver, R.L. (1991). The dimensionality of consumption emotion
patterns and consumer satisfaction. Journal of Consumer Research, 18, 84-91.
Winsted, K.F. (1997). The service experience in two cultures: A behavioural perspective.
Journal of Retailing, 73(3), 337-360.
Winsted, K.F. (2000). Service behaviours that lead to satisfied customers. European
Journal of Marketing, 34, 399-417.
Yalch, R.F., & Spangenberg, E. (1990). Effects of store music on shopping behaviour.
Journal of Consumer Marketing, 7(Spring), 55-63.
Yoo B., Donthu, N., & Lee, S. (2000). An examination of selected marketing mix
elements and brand equity. Journal of Academy of Marketing Science, 28(Spring),
195-211.
Zeithaml, V.A., Berry, L.L., & Parasuraman, A. (1993). The nature and determinants of
customer expectations of service. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science,
2l(Winter), 1-12.
About the Authors and Correspondence
Ahmed Rageh Ismail is currently working as a lecturer of Marketing and
Consumer Behaviour at School of Hospitality and Tourism Management,
Fayoum University, Egypt. He received his PhD degree in Marketing at Brunel
University, UK, 2010. His general area of expertise is consumer marketing.
Ahmed’s specific research interest is to understand theories and concepts
that explain consumer-brand relationships in both services and products
brands. His area of research led to him to explore the contemporary
concept of customer experience, a relatively neglected area of research
despite its importance to brand managers. He adopted both qualitative and
quantitative approaches, utilising netnography research methodology and
self-administered questionnaires in his PhD to uncover customer experiences.
Ahmed has been a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Cairo University since
2000, teaching a variety of marketing modules, including Service Marketing,
Marketing Management and Marketing Research.
Corresponding Author: Ahmed Rageh Ismail, Fayoum University,
Fayoum 63514, Egypt
E rageh_a@yahoo.com
The Marketing Review, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 3
224
Ismail, Melewar, Lim & Woodside Customer experiences with brands
TC Melewar is Professor of Marketing and Strategy at Brunel Business School.
He obtained his PhD from Loughborough University. His research interests are
in the areas of branding, corporate identity and international marketing. He
has published in the European Journal of Marketing, International Marketing
Review and Journal of International Business Studies amongst others.
T.C. Melewar, Brunel Business School, Brunel University, London, UB8 3PH,
UK
E t.c.melewar@brunel.ac.uk
Dr. Lynn Lim is a Reader within the Roehampton Business School at the
University of Roehampton London. She is also Head of the International
Management Program within the School of Management and Law at the
Zurich University of Applied Science. Her research and teaching include
international business, marketing and research methods. She is a member
of the Editorial Board of European Journal of Innovation Management and
International Journal of Technology Marketing.
Lynn Lim, Roehampton University, Erasmus House, Roehampton Lane,
London, SW15 5PU, UK
E L.Lim@roehampton.ac.uk
Arch G. Woodside is Professor of Marketing, Boston College. He is a Fellow
and Member of the APA, APS, Royal Society of Canada, Society for Marketing
Advances, and the International Academy for the Study of Tourism. He is
the Editor in Chief, Journal of Business Research. He is a past-president of
the Society of Consumer Psychology. He is the founder of the International
Academy of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research.
Arch Woodside, Boston College, 350 Fulton Hall, 140 Commonwealth
Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA
E woodsiar@bc.edu
225
