Customer Experience Management in Retailing: Understanding the Buying Process

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Abstract

Retailers recognize that greater understanding of customers can enhance customer satisfaction and retail performance. This article seeks to enrich this understanding by providing an overview of existing consumer behavior literature and suggesting that specific elements of consumer behavior—goals, schema, information processing, memory, involvement, attitudes, affective processing, atmospherics, and consumer attributions and choices—play important roles during various stages of the consumer decision process. The authors suggest ways in which retailers can leverage this understanding of consumer behavior. Each of these conceptual areas also offers avenues for further research.

Section snippets

Goals, schema, and information processing

Few human behaviors are as purposeful as shopping. To understand retailing and consumer experiences, we must realize that consumers attempt to achieve some goal by purchasing and using a particular product or service (Ratneshwar, Mick, and Huffman 2000). Consumers shop for various reasons, which may not include a specific need for a product or service (Tauber 1972); for example, they may need entertainment, recreation, social interaction, or intellectual stimulation (Arnold and Reynolds 2003).

Memory

As a field dedicated to the function of the mind, psychology has long studied memory and the acquisition, storage and retrieval of information. The following brief review of memory research addresses these key constructs with significant implications for consumer behavior and retailing, including how information enters memory, how information is retained in memory, and how it is accessed from memory when needed. The association between retailing and memory crosses all three stages.

Involvement

Much of what retailers do seeks to attract attention and communicate a message—a point-of-purchase display, weekly circular, or Web site. Attributes of communication contribute to attracting consumers’ attention, but an equally important attribute lies with the consumer: the degree to which he or she is involved, engaged, or views the message as important. These factors drive consumers’ inherent motivation to attend to retailers’ communications.

Attitudes

Retailers expend significant effort trying to evoke positive attitudes toward their outlets and sites, as well as to the goods and services they carry. The logic is that if people have a positive attitude, they may be more likely to engage in behavior that benefits the retailer. While the theory of attitudes is well-established throughout marketing, research supporting the attitude–behavior link is equivocal. Yet most researchers still stop their inquiries at the level of attitudes without

Affective processing

Affect has gained prominence as consumer behavior and retailing researchers identify more opportunities to evoke it through the retail environment, employee interactions, and advertising. However, the time has come to identify how retailers can develop affect and make retail experiences fun. Affect is virtually ubiquitous; occasions in which people are truly in a neutral state are rare. Its influence on behavior appears similarly commonplace, such that affect may influence attitudes,

Atmospherics

As noted in previous sections, atmospherics can impact the consumer decision process in many ways. Fig. 1 depicts its effect on the evaluation, purchase, and postpurchase stages, likely due to its integral role in retailing. It is difficult to imagine a retailer in the absence of its environment, yet some retailers clearly do more to enhance their atmosphere for consumers.

Consumer attributions and choices

In the final stages of the consumer decision process, consumer attributions and choices become central to consumer behavior. Consumers’ perception of causality as it relates to a retailer and its products can have a substantial impact on their perceptions of the retailer and their intentions to return to a store. For added complexity, consumers might have a positive experience, but if they attribute that experience to their own actions, rather than the retailer's, the experience is unlikely to

Conclusion

This review summarizes the contributions of various important consumer behavior theories and research streams pertaining to shaping and influencing customer experiences. The key domains we discuss (goals, schemas, and information processing; memory; involvement; attitudes; affective processing; atmospherics; and consumer attribution and choice) are not exhaustive, yet they offer a wealth of insights for the retailing arena. We hope this overview stimulates additional research into the host of

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