Defining, Measuring and Managing Consumer Experiences

Annarita Sorrentino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000195514
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the challenges that marketing faces in understanding, managing and measuring the dynamics of modern consumer behaviours and successfully managing the customer experience.

The reader will gain a deeper knowledge of the approaches to consumer behaviour and learn about the theoretical and empirical challenges of studying customer experience management. It also considers the post-modern consumer, which requires a move beyond the purely rationalist perspective of traditional marketing and provides methodological support for firms and scholars who wish to measure cognitive, emotional and behavioural consumer reactions. More specifically, it explores the changes in consumer behaviours, the limitations of traditional measurement approaches and the importance of capturing small insights with neuromarketing metrics, with a chapter contributed by a leading expert. A new three-point perspective on consumer behaviours is set out that combines behaviour (what people do) with the declared (what people say) and the perceived (what people feel). This approach acknowledges the complexity of consumer behaviours and the methodological bias derived from the use of the traditional techniques (principally the survey) or from big data. Only a holistic perspective can capture the heterogeneous nature of consumer behaviour.

The book thereby takes up the theoretical debate about the definition, management and measurement of customer behaviour. It also examines measurement methodologies, an area that has received little attention elsewhere. Besides addressing the scientific community in the field, the book will also be a valuable practical resource for marketing managers, entrepreneurs and consultants who want to implement innovative strategies to manage the customer experience.

Chapter 1
FROM BEHAVIOURS TO EXPERIENCES

SUMMARY: 1.1. Consumer behaviours. – 1.1.1. Factors influencing behavioural choices. – 1.1.2. The post-modern consumption paradigms. – 1.1.3. The linear customer journey. – 1.2. Satisfaction, value and experience. – 1.2.1. An experiential perspective on value creation. – 1.3. The circular consumer journey – 1.3.1. The role of emotions. – 1.3.2. Towards memorable experiences.

1.1. Consumer behaviours

The analysis of consumer behaviour is crucial for firms to survive in a today’s very competitive environment. Therefore, firms need to fully understand the evolution of the consumption paradigms, in order to match their value proposition to the new market trends and the consumer behaviours. However, the process of taking a new product offering from design to implementation is not easy, because it is related to rapidly changing consumer desires and behaviours, especially with the introduction of new technologies and the ease of finding information (Quintano, 2006).

Customer-oriented firms are that have the ability to revise their product offering even when they receive only weak external signals advising on the need to innovate.

Due to its strategic role, and despite its complexity, the analysis of consumer behaviour should be considered as one of the most important ways to reduce the gap between supply and demand. That analysis then needs to inform the firm’s marketing activity.

There are, though, limitations to the traditional approaches oriented to product, market and sales. Those traditional approaches concentrate on the attributes and benefits of the products and tend to completely ignore any consideration of the image and intangible qualities of products. Markets and the competition are classified according to the characteristics and benefits of products, while consumption and the contexts of use are not taken into account. This obviously very limited vision of competition has a negative effect on the analysis and strategy phases of marketing. The approach is also characterised by a lack of attention to the international context and an adaptive orientation to the environment.

Firms that adopt this approach consider customers to be simple rational decision-makers who exclusively analyse the attributes and benefits of the products; the impact of the emotional aspects of consumption and other situational factors on the purchase are not taken into account.

At the practical level, the market research used by firms is a purely analytical and verbal activity, yet more effective methods of market research are based on the observation of customers in their natural environment.

In response to all this, an innovative approach is beginning to develop, a new orientation towards individual behaviours and, in particular, to customer loyalty and long-term relationships. The first step in meeting the real needs of customers is the consideration that each customer is a person, and so it is necessary to gather as much information as possible to try to satisfy that person’s needs and desires, in order to establish a strong relationship.

In this chapter we go through the old and the new approaches to the study of consumer behaviour. We analyse both the factors influencing the decision-making process and the roles that each customer may assume in that process from the perspective of the customer experience.

1.1.1. Factors influencing behavioural choices

As postulated in marketing studies, the decision-making process is affected by numerous personal, socio-cultural, situational and psychological factors. Personal factors include socio-demographic and lifestyle variables, as well as personality traits.

The sociodemographic variables include the income, gender, age and education. They represent the easiest way to segment the market. For example, in the cruise marketing literature, ships have been categorised on the basis of the sociodemographic variables of their target market (Li and Kwortnik, 2016; Brida and Risso, 2010). So, mega-ships have been identified as being for the mainstream market, while the premium category is framed for more sophisticated people. A second important factor is stage of family life cycle. For marketing managers it is important to distinguish family units from the single individual and the young couple, a small family with one baby or a family with several children, for example. While few studies have researched the influence of sociodemographic variables, more have analysed the impact of personality traits on purchase behaviour (Dabholkar and Bagozzi, 2002). Ranaweera et al (2008) analysed the impact of personality traits on the web-site experience. Their research demonstrates that web-based service providers with little-known brands need to work extra hard to ensure that their websites do not just match those of their larger competitors, but that they go beyond them in offering a unique online experience.

Another important factor which affects consumer behaviour is cultural background. In marketing studies, culture has generally been investigated in order to identify differences and similarities among countries. Hofstede (1984) defined culture as a series of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts (Risitano et al., 2017). Starting from this consideration, each firm has to do a detailed analysis of culture before it develops a product for a certain target market.

Psychological factors are related to learning and the elaboration of the information, and the way people respond to environmental stimuli (Zeithaml, Bitner, et al., 2002). A positive psychological state can increase a person’s propensity to engage in a purchase/consumption experience. In a more in-depth psychological analysis, the study of perceptions and categorisation of information and attitudes assume importance.

Perceptions are considered as the process in which an individual selects, organises and interprets stimuli (Kotler and Keller, 2013). Obviously, this process depends on the internal factors discussed above (such as personality, culture and socio-demographics) but also on external factors (such as situational factors). So, it is important for firms to design the right touch-points at which individuals can have positive perceptions of and positive interactions with their product offerings. In this sense, new smart technologies based on machine learning (for example technologies that allow firms to listen to online chats) should improve the firm’s marketing strategies, as they can offer the firm a means to respond to people’s emotional state.

Lastly, attitudes are an overall evaluation of how much people like (or not) a situation, product or person (Innis, 2003). A person’s attitude may be influenced along the cognitive, affective and conative dimensions. The cognitive and affective elements include the rational and the emotional elements related to a certain object and influence the final decision to approach or avoid it (the conative dimension).

So, it is easy to understand how a final decision is a result of the complicated processing of rational and emotional elements. With the increasing number of stimuli in terms of new products and services and also with the development of new channels to search, see and select, a new paradigm of consumption may be more oriented to unconscious behaviours.

1.1.2. The post-modern consumption paradigms

Over the past years, as noted above, companies have based their competitiveness on an experience-centric strategy. The central idea of this approach is to consolidate company competitiveness through the involvement of customers by giving them the prosumer role in their use of the offered services, to value the authenticity of the experiences and to produce unique and memorable experiences (Ali et al., 2014). However, to create memorable experiences, the costumers’ involvement has to be active and to predict a strong involvement in the use of the ‘product’ (Pine and Gilmore, 1998). Consequently, companies should seek to create an atmosphere that involves the customer’s cognitive and emotional state in a way that generates additional symbolic value, which the customer can keep in mind as new positive memories linked to the experience (O’Sullivan and Spangler, 1998).

Customer satisfaction is a proxy for the creation of value which can influence future purchases and communication by word of mouth.

In this chapter, the principal factors which have an impact on customer’s behaviour will first be defined, and then the stages in the establishment of value will be set out, as well as the determinants of value. Value can be expressed as a desire to recommend the brand or product and to repur-chase.

From the offer side, the company basically has to move from a marketing approach that focuses on the mass market to a human-based approach and products which are differentiated and capable of meeting the different trends and ever pickier demand segmentation.

From the demand side, significant changes during the buying and consumer process have been registered. These changes have revealed the need to set up tailor-made consumer products with a high symbolic content in terms of authenticity and experience.

These factors emphasise the engagement and co-creation of value by the customer and the firm during the different stages of the buying and consumer process, from the pre-purchase to the experience stage.

The evolution of consumption paradigms is increasingly characterised by passivity, whim and speed, which means that often customers buy as a consequence of unconscious and uncontrollable attitudes. In this scenario, it is easy to understand that the micro-segmentation of consumer demand differs from the traditional descriptive criteria (e.g. gender, age, earning), which are no longer sufficient to describe the attitudes and behaviours of complex purchases. There are now multi-purpose criteria that relate to components linked to the lifestyle, behaviours and benefits that are sought, and that can, paradoxically, target individuals with different sociodemographic characteristics.

Nevertheless, although the new consumer paradigms explicitly characterise the post-modern customer, in the analysis of consumer behaviour the traditional factors reported in the literature (Quintano, 2006; Napolitano 2010) remain effective. Among these factors, the external type, for example social and cultural influences (Zeithaml et al. 2002), should be considered.

Cross-cultural management studies have shown that consumer groups from different cultures (in part geographic) have different feelings in terms of services and brand image, and different behaviours during the valuation and purchase and consumption stages.

In this sense, the factors that characterise the human psychological sphere and that influence behaviour are perceptions, the categorisation of information, and attitudes (Teas, 1993). Marketing activities need to locate the information in an effective and accessible way and make messages and motivations easily categorised and comparable.

Among the internal factors – those that concern the individual’s personal and psychological sphere – motivation is an important factor in customer behaviour (Eagles, 1992; Fodness, 1994), which has characterised demand evolution over the past years.

The new consumption trends in which customers are increasingly looking for symbolic value from their purchases and consumption experiences, which is sedentary and passive, towards consumers being ‘able to do’ or ‘able to live’ an authentic and local experience so as to improve themselves and increase their knowledge of the world. A transition from the simple use of the tangible resource (e.g. monuments) to researching imperceptible resources (e.g. emotions and experiences) occurs. This changes the behaviour of the destinations and companies as well, which should move more towards narration and relation, with simple forms of communication.

The post-modern customer is directed towards research of personal and involving experiences. Purchases have become a way to express individual identity. They are the extension of the value of each person (Oliviero and Russo, 2009). Today’s customer, above all, needs to turn the act of purchasing and consumption into a unique experience.

1.1.3. The linear consumer journey

As we have seen, purchase behaviour is complex and not linear. The principal stages of the journey are the revelation of necessity, research of information, valuation of alternatives, the buying decision and a post-purchase stage.

The analysis of consumer behaviour aims to verify the factors that affect the determinants of perceived value. Value for the customer is a familiar concept in the marketing literature and we can define the links between the benefits offered by the product or service and the necessary costs once these benefits are obtained (Zeithalm, 1988; Woodall, 2003). The benefits refer to the advantages expected using the product: functional, psychosocial and experiential benefits. The costs we explicitly refer to are the purchase costs but also the cost of evaluating and choosing the product as well as the costs of use.

From a marketing perspective, the aim of value creation for the customer becomes instrumental for the value creation of the company. As evident in the literature, customers are attracted and create loyalty once their needs are satisfied and they start to manifest through their satisfaction their future behaviours (intention to buy again, intention to recommend the product) (Kotler, Bowen and Makens 2010; Lee, Kyle and Scott, 2012).

The different stages of the consumer experience outlined above imply that it is not only possible but also manageable to create additional value at every single stage. Complexity and aggregation of a brand’s services make it often hard to establish which elements most affect the created value for the consumers, while the creation of value for the customers can certainly be defined during the different stages of the journey.

During the pre-experience stage, when the customer collects information and develops expectations, and is influenced by multiple internal and external factors, the marketing action focused on the creation of value should leverage the transmission of value linked to the product image and brand, looking as much as possible to meet the value linked to the individual’s planning to buy that brand (self-congruity). From this point of view, marketing research can crucially reveal behaviour, motivations, and lifestyle to minimise any mismatch between the expectation and the value perceived during and after the visit (Costabile, 1996), which can then influence intention and post-visit behaviour.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• List of figures and tables
• Introduction
• 1. From behaviours to experiences
• 2. Ecclectic approaches to measure consumer responses
• 3. Neuromarketing to discover the small insights
• 4. Managing consumer centricity
• 5. Customer experience management (CEM). State-of-the-art and best practices
• Conclusion
• References