Explore the vast range of titles available.

Customer experience management research is increasingly concerned with the long-term evolution of customer experience journeys across multiple service cycles. A dominant smooth journey model makes customers’ lives easier, with a cyclical pattern of predictable experiences that builds customer loyalty over time, also known as a loyalty loop. An alternate sticky journey model makes customers’ lives exciting, with a cyclical pattern of unpredictable experiences that increases customer involvement over time, conceptualized here as an involvement spiral. Whereas the smooth journey model is ideal for instrumental services that facilitate jobs to be done, the sticky journey model is ideal for recreational services that facilitate never-ending adventures. To match the flow of each journey type, firms are advised to encourage purchases during the initial service cycles of smooth journeys, or subsequent service cycles of sticky journeys. In multiservice systems, firms can sustain customer journeys by interlinking loyalty loops and involvement spirals. The article concludes with new journey-centered questions for customer experience management research, as well as branding research, consumer culture theory, consumer psychology, and transformative service research.

Although research continues to debate the future of the marketing concept, practitioners have taken the lead, appraising customer experience management (CEM) as one of the most promising marketing approaches in consumer industries. In research, however, the notion of CEM is not well understood, is fragmented across a variety of contexts, and is insufficiently demarcated from other marketing management concepts. By integrating field-based insights of 52 managers engaging in CEM with supplementary literature, this study provides an empirically and theoretically solid conceptualization. Specifically, it introduces CEM as a higher-order resource of cultural mindsets toward customer experiences (CEs), strategic directions for designing CEs, and firm capabilities for continually renewing CEs, with the goals of achieving and sustaining long-term customer loyalty. We disclose a typology of four distinct CEM patterns, with firm size and exchange continuity delineating the pertinent contingency factors of this generalized understanding. Finally, we discuss the findings in relation to recent theoretical research, proposing that CEM can comprehensively systemize and serve the implementation of an evolving marketing concept.

In an ever more transparent, digitalized, and connected environment, customers are increasingly pressuring brands to embrace genuine corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and co-creation activities. While both CSR and co-creation are social and collaborative processes, there is still little research examining whether CSR can boost co-creation. In addition, while previous research has mainly related co-creation to emotional outcomes (e.g., customer affective commitment), limited empirical research has related it to rational (e.g., customer trust) and behavioral outcomes (e.g., customer loyalty). To address these shortcomings in the literature, this paper examines the influence of CSR on customer loyalty, considering the mediating roles of co-creation and customer trust. It also investigates the influence of co-creation on customer trust. The data were collected in Spain in late 2017 using an online survey, and the sample contained 1101 customers of health insurance services brands. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized relationships simultaneously. The results show that CSR influences customer loyalty both directly and indirectly through co-creation and customer trust. However, the indirect impact is the stronger of the two, implying that embracing co-creation activities and developing customer trust can make it easier for CSR practices to enhance customer loyalty. In addition, co-creation has a direct effect on customer trust.

In recent years, online retailers (also called e-tailers) have started allowing manufacturers direct access to their customers while charging a fee for providing this access, a format commonly referred to as agency selling. In this paper, we use a stylized theoretical model to answer a key question that e-tailers are facing: When should they use an agency selling format instead of using the more conventional reselling format? We find that agency selling is more efficient than reselling and leads to lower retail prices; however, the e-tailers end up giving control over retail prices to the manufacturer. Therefore, the reaction by the manufacturer, who makes electronic channel pricing decisions based on their impact on demand in the traditional channel (brick-and-mortar retailing), is an important factor for e-tailers to consider. We find that when sales in the electronic channel lead to a negative effect on demand in the traditional channel, e-tailers prefer agency selling, whereas when sales in the electronic channel lead to substantial stimulation of demand in the traditional channel, e-tailers prefer reselling. This preference is mediated by competition between e-tailers—as competition between them increases, e-tailers prefer to use agency selling. We also find that when e-tailers benefit from positive externalities from the sales of the focal product (such as additional profits from sales of associated products), retail prices may be lower under reselling than under agency selling, and the e-tailers prefer reselling under some conditions for which they would prefer agency selling without the positive externalities. This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems.

Firms spend substantial resources responding to customer complaints, and the marketing profession has a long history of supporting that enterprise to promote customer loyalty. The authors question whether this response is always warranted or whether its effectiveness instead depends on economic, industry, customer–firm, product/service, and customer segment factors that may alter the firm’s incentives to compete on complaint management. To consider this question, they integrate economic and marketing theories and investigate factors that influence the complaint recovery–customer loyalty relationship via a sample of 35,597 complaining customers spanning a ten-year period across economic sectors, industries, and firms. Overall, the authors find that the recovery–loyalty relationship is stronger in faster-growing economies, for industries with more competition, for luxury products, and for customers with higher satisfaction and higher expectations of customization. Conversely, the recovery–loyalty relationship is weaker when customers’ expectations of product/service reliability are higher, for manufactured goods, and for men compared with women. The authors discuss implications of these results for managers, policy makers, and researchers for more effective management of customer complaints.

Although marketing researchers agree that brand authenticity has various meanings, little consensus exists concerning the number of meanings and what those meanings entail. This paper addresses this lack of clarity in the literature by introducing the Entity-Referent Correspondence (ERC) Framework of Authenticity. The ERC Framework provides an overarching definition of authenticity—a consumer’s perception of the degree to which a supposed authentic entity corresponds with or is “true to” something else, which we label a referent. The ERC Framework also suggests three types of authenticity—true-to-ideal, true-to-fact, and true-to-self—that are consistent with the general definition yet are distinct. Each type may manifest in a variety of ways in a brand context, suggesting that brand authenticity is not a singular concept. The framework also proposes nomological nets that explain how consumers form perceptions of each type, how the types lead to managerially relevant outcomes (e.g., expected quality, trust), and how the types affect each other. This research advances the literature on brand authenticity by offering three types of conceptual contributions as identified by MacInnis (2011): integrating, differentiating, and delineating.

Achieving customer loyalty is a primary marketing goal, but building loyalty and reaping its rewards remain ongoing challenges. Theory suggests that loyalty comprises attitudes and purchase behaviors that benefit one seller over competitors. Yet researchers examining loyalty adopt widely varying conceptual and operational approaches. The present investigation examines the consequences of this heterogeneity by empirically mapping current conceptual approaches using an item-level coding of extant loyalty research, then testing how operational and study-specific characteristics moderate the strategy → loyalty → performance process through meta-analytic techniques. The results clarify dissimilarities in loyalty building strategies, how loyalty differentially affects performance and word of mouth, and the consequences of study-specific characteristics. Prescriptive advice based on 163 studies of customer loyalty addresses three seemingly simple but very critical questions: What is customer loyalty ? How is it measured ? and What actually matters when it comes to customer loyalty ?

Online food delivery service (OFDS) has been widely utilized during the new normal of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in a developing country such as Indonesia. The purpose of this study was to determine factors influencing customer satisfaction and loyalty in OFDS during the new normal of the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia by utilizing the extended theory of planned behavior (TPB) approach. A total of 253 respondents voluntarily participated and answered 65 questions. Structural equation modeling (SEM) indicated that hedonic motivation (HM) was found to have the highest effect on customer satisfaction, followed by price (P), information quality (IQ), and promotion (PRO). Interestingly, this study found out that usability factors, such as navigational design (ND) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) were not significant to customer satisfaction and loyalty in OFDS during the new normal of COVID-19. This study can be the theoretical foundation that could be very beneficial for OFDS investors, IT engineers, and even academicians. Finally, this study can be applied and extended to determine factors influencing customer satisfaction and loyalty in OFDS during the new normal of COVID-19 in other countries.

[Display omitted] •Customer attitudinal loyalty can be held with different levels of conviction.•In the presence of barriers, attitudinal loyalty with conviction predicts behavior.•Customer-company identification fosters conative loyalty with conviction.•Customer satisfaction fosters conative loyalty without conviction.•Retailers take on risk by exclusively pursuing customer satisfaction-based loyalty. Why do customers’ attitudinal loyalty fail to predict their behavior? More importantly, what creates such latent loyalty? We attempt to answer these questions by examining the antecedents and outcomes of loyalty conviction, which represents the inherent strength/uncertainty in a customer’s attitudinal loyalty. For deep attitudinal loyalty (i.e., conative loyalty), the findings suggest that customer satisfaction creates loyalty held without conviction. In contrast, customer-company identification creates loyalty held with conviction. Importantly, attitudinal loyalty without conviction loses its ability to predict behavior when situational and competitive barriers are present whereas loyalty with conviction maintains a predictive relationship with behavior despite the same barriers.

Advancements in information technology have changed the way customers experience a service encounter and their relationship with service providers. Especially technology-based self-service channels have found their way into the 21st century service economy. While research embraces these channels for their cost-efficiency, it has not examined whether a shift from personal to self-service affects customer–firm relationships. Drawing from the service-dominant logic and its central concept of value-in-context, we discuss customers’ value creation in self-service and personal service channels and examine the long-term impact of these channels on customer retention. Using longitudinal customer data, we investigate how the ratio of self-service versus personal service use influences customer defection over time. Our findings suggest that the ratio of self-service to personal service used affects customer defection in a U-shaped manner, with intermediate levels of both self-service and personal service use being associated with the lowest likelihood of defection. We also find that this effect mitigates over time. We conclude that firms should not shift customers toward self-service channels completely, especially not at the beginning of a relationship. Our study underlines the importance of understanding when and how self-service technologies create valuable customer experiences and stresses the notion of actively managing customers’ cocreation of value.