Qualitative Consumer Research

Russell W. Belk, Naresh K. Malhotra

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787149465
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing Research
• Index: Business

In spite of, and because of, the attention recently paid to "big data" and the huge amount quantitative data available from online and point of sale transactions, qualitative and conceptual research is in greater demand than ever. Rather than the correlational and superficial view provided from the overflow of numerical data, qualitative and conceptual data help to make sense of what is really going on among consumers. Numerical approaches are a useful first cut at detecting changes in market patterns, but they fail to help understand the underlying and deeper meanings of these data among individual consumers, families, and consumption communities. By gathering data from observation (first hand and automated), depth interviews, projective measures, netnography, videography, qualitative marketing and consumer research help put flesh on the bones of often sterile quantitative data. This volume provides a good illustration of the sorts of insights that qualitative and conceptual analysis can provide. Using some of the latest qualitative research tools, this volume highlights insights about consumption ranging from how consumers process advertising messages, how skiers consume a ski resort, and how small retailers can combat the practice of "showrooming" by consumers comparing online prices with mobile devices to the nature of consumer "presence, rethinking the meanings of prices, and buying counterfeit luxuries with friends. These and other practices provide eye-opening insights of their own. But they also spark the imagination by demonstrating what qualitative research can do and why it is an increasingly popular set of techniques.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE RESEARCH WITH MOBILE ETHNOGRAPHY: A CASE STUDY OF THE ALPINE DESTINATION SERFAUS-FISS-LADIS

Birgit Bosio, Katharina Rainer and Marc Stickdorn

ABSTRACT

Purpose – Many companies struggle with the assessment of customer experience. This chapter aims to demonstrate how mobile ethnography tackles this issue by assessing data in a holistical way, in-situ, and in real-time.

Methodology/approach – The chapter describes the implementation of a mobile ethnography project in a tourist destination, including participant recruitment, data collection, data analysis, and the derivation of insights.

Findings – The mobile ethnography project allowed to gain deep insights into the customers’ journeys.

Research limitations/implications – Future research will need to further investigate questions of participant recruitment, the effectiveness of incentives as well as the performance of the data collection process. Furthermore the findings of this case need to be replicated in the context of other industries, as well as in other cultural contexts.

Practical implications – Mobile ethnography allows companies to gain more information on customer experience in real-time, thus with reduced cognitive and emotional bias. Therefore, the method can help to improve the touristic service offering and, consequently, customer experience.

Originality/value – As companies are searching for new approaches to research and manage customer experience, this chapter is of high value for both academia and practice.

Keywords: Customer experience research; mobile ethnography; customer journey; tourism; case study; Serfaus-Fiss-Ladis

INTRODUCTION

During the last years, markets have developed from seller’s into consumer’s markets (M. Zerres & Zerres, 2006). One reason for the shift was the rise of the Internet: customers can access a lot more information, hence they are much better informed. Price comparison, online reviews, and rating websites boost transparency. Respective contents are delivered not only by companies themselves anymore, but also by other customers. Especially the rise of social media caused a shift of power: social media has given customers a voice to share their experiences – and they dare to use their power, as the example of Dave Carroll and his ‘United Breaks Guitars’ song shows (Carroll, 2012).

Customers with positive experiences are more likely to recommend a product, service, or brand – and thereby positively influence others in their purchase decision; on the other hand, there is a high probability that customers with negative experiences will influence others not to buy or use a product or service (Buttle & Maklan, 2015). This new type of word-of-mouth (WOM) has an enriching influence on customer experiences (Verhoef et al., 2009) and changes the purchase decision-making process (Vermeulen & Seegers, 2009). Thus, it turns individual customer experiences into a decisive competitive advantage; in 2016, 89% of American companies state to compete mainly on the basis of customer experience – compared with only 36% in 2012 (Sorofman, 2014).

Active management of customer experience can make or break the success of any product, service, or brand, but management often struggles with the first step already: the collection of meaningful and actionable data. Traditional methods like surveys and interviews mainly assess objective, cognitive dimensions retrospectively (Oliver, 1993); thus, they have turned out not to be sufficient in order to capture highly subjective, emotional dimensions (Meyer & Schwager, 2007; Schwarz, 2007). In order to address this issue, the new method of mobile ethnography has been developed, and now turns out to be effective to capture customer experience (Stickdorn & Frischhut, 2012).

This chapter introduces mobile ethnography as a research approach to customer experiences and provides insights into a mobile ethnography project in Serfaus-Fiss-Ladis, one of Austria’s leading tourist destinations. The authors discuss some main terms of customer experience management, the challenges of customer experience research, and requirements a research method should meet. Based on this, the case of Serfaus-Fiss-Ladis is presented.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT

Customer Experience

Satisfied customers are expected to become loyal customers, who then turn into enthusiastic advocates of a product, service, or brand (Buttle & Maklan, 2015). Per definition, customer satisfaction is “… a post-purchase phenomenon reflecting how much the consumer likes or dislikes the service after experiencing it” (Woodside, Frey, & Daly, 1989, p. 6). Thus, customer experience can be considered as the main antecedent of satisfaction and, in order to influence customer satisfaction, a company must start to design services and manage customer experience (Stickdorn & Schneider, 2010).

For a long time, marketing research had not recognized the importance of customer experience and mainly focused on customer satisfaction and service quality (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry, 1988; Verhoef, Langerak, & Donkers, 2007). Although the early attempts in paying more attention to the experiential aspects of consumption (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982) as well as the feelings and thoughts of customers (Schmitt, 1999), customer experience has not been considered as a separate construct. Within the last 20 years, however, the focus has shifted.

Customer experience embraces much more than customer service (Goodman, 2014). According to Pine and Gilmore (1998) the success of a company lies in creating personal added value for customers by developing authentic experiences. Thus, several authors call for a deeper understanding of customer experience (Goodman, 2014; Meyer & Schwager, 2007; Pine & Gilmore, 1998; Verhoef et al., 2009):

Most executives think that if their staff is courteous, responsive, and effective, their company is delivering a great customer experience. Not true – because customer experience is end to end, ranging from honesty in marketing through the product lasting beyond the warranty period. This lack of differentiation between customer experience and service is the first of a myriad of misperceptions that prevent executives from getting an accurate understanding of their current level of customer experience. (Goodman, 2014, p. 11f)

There is no consensus on a definition of customer experience. However, most definitions highlight its personal (Gentile, Spiller, & Noci, 2007) and subjective (C. F. Chen & Chen, 2010) character. Customer experience is holistic (Verhoef et al., 2009), which describes the fact that it includes sensory, cognitive, emotional, behavioral, relational, and affective aspects (Zehrer, 2009), physical responses (Verhoef et al., 2009), and even spiritual involvement (Gentile et al., 2007).

Traditionally customer experience was at the center of services (Edvardsson, Enquist, & Johnston, 2005) especially of industries based on hedonic consumption (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982), like tourism and leisure. This is rooted in the characteristics of services: intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability make it impossible to assess customer experience in an objective way (Zeithaml, Parasuraman, & Berry, 1985). However, the economic offerings of products and services are blurring (Lovelock & Gummesson, 2004) and goods are increasingly handled as services (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). Thus, customer experience is relevant for any industry, regardless if it is product- or service-based.

Components of Customer Experience

One of the basics of customer experience is the notion of touchpoints, because every touchpoint with a service, product, brand, or company leads to an experience – might it be positive, negative, or neutral (Berry, Carbone, & Haeckel, 2002). Meyer and Schwager (2007) describe touchpoints as any kind of direct or indirect contact point between the customer and the service provider. The authors state, “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, service or brands and takes the form of word-of-mouth recommendations or criticism, advertising, news reports, reviews and so forth” (p. 118). By their definition, the authors make aware of the diverse channels of customer experience. Online channels (online advertising, email, social media, etc.) and offline channels (print media, servicescape, WOM, etc.) are both relevant.

The customers themselves are indispensable for the creation of value and are co-creators of value (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). Hence, they are also co-creators of experiences (Teixeira et al., 2012). However, customer experience is not only influenced by interactions between the customer and the company, but can also be determined by external influences (Schmitt & Mangold, 2004; Verhoef et al., 2009). These influences can be related to the customer, company, performance, situation, or environment (Bruhn & Hadwich, 2012; Patricio, Fisk, & Cunha, 2008; Verhoef et al., 2009).

Touchpoints do not only arise during the consumption process, but even in the search phase and in the after-sales phase (Verhoef et al., 2009). The resulting memories of the consumption experience can be touchpoints as well (Arnould & Price, 1993).

A sequence of touchpoints forms a customer journey. However, in most cases customers do not only think about a specific brand, product, or service. Instead they use a product or service to achieve something, such as going on a holiday. During this ‘leading experience’, they interact with a brand, product, or service through touchpoints. In between these touchpoints, they do other things (often called ‘steps’ of a customer journey) that might be as well important for their overall experience, such as ‘waiting for a confirmation’, or ‘getting information about alternatives/competitors’. To understand the entire end-to-end experience, it is important to understand a customer journey as a sequence of steps of which some are touchpoints with a particular brand, product, or service (Stickdorn, Lawrence, Hormess, & Schneider, 2017).

A customer journey can be visualized by the creation of a customer journey map (CJM), a tool that is closely related to storyboards, but with the fundamental difference that all steps are constructed out of the customer’s perspective. By showing the customer’s steps from the very beginning of the customer journey, a CJM represents key moments from the customer’s perspective, as well as crucial factors influencing customer experience (Stickdorn & Schneider, 2010). Hence, a CJM can help a company to analyze both negative and positive experiences, identify the key elements and their influence of the overall experience. Thus, chances for improvement, new opportunities or innovation processes can be discovered and approached. Journey maps can be applied as customer journey maps to visualize customer experiences, for example, the guests of a tourist destination, but also as employee journey maps to visualize employee experiences, for example, the service provider’s employees.

Concluding, not all of the touchpoints are intended by the customer, nor must they be intended by the company; thus, the influence of the company on touchpoints is limited. The touchpoints customers experience vary, even though customers might search for exactly the same offering. Thus, they experience a diverse customer journey. Management must keep this into account, so it bases decisions on the providing of the offering based on this knowledge. A customer journey map is a high-potential tool for companies to do so.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE RESEARCH

A decade ago, customer experience was commonly assessed by the use of service quality scales, for example, SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al., 1988). However, the quality of an experience is not the same as the quality of a service (Otto & Ritchie, 1995): the quality of a service could be assessed objectively, focusing on the service provider and on functional benefits, and, henc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• A New Bridge from Text to Mind: Cognitive Literary Approaches to Advertising
• Exploring the Country of Origin Effect: A Qualitative Analysis of Turkish Consumption Practices☆
• The Influence of Bad Credit on Consumers’ Identities
• Showrooming and the Small Retailer
• Subalterns Approach to Chain Supermarketization: Modern Grocery Retailers versus Independent Small Grocers
• Customer Experience Research with Mobile Ethnography: A Case Study of the Alpine Destination Serfaus-Fiss-Ladis
• Alleviating Survivor Loneliness: The Value of Expressive Gift Systems in Peer-To-Peer Online Patient Survivor Networks
• Price: Meanings and Significance
• Convenience Orientation in the 21st Century: Qualitative Insights from Interviews with Consumers and Marketing Professionals
• Being Present: Toward a Better Understanding of Customer Experiences
• Purse Parties: A Phenomenology of In-Home Counterfeit Luxury Events
• Previous Volume Contents
• Index