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Chronos and Kairos: Reconceptualizing Temporality of Customer Experiences
Abstract and Figures
While time flow is said to be a credential quality of the customer experience, research on its temporal facets remains scarce and fragmented. We provide a state-of-the-art review on temporal aspects resulting in three facets of temporality: scope of time, time parameters, and temporal relations. Building on these findings, we develop a more comprehensive and integrative framework regarding the chronology and dynamics of the customer experience based on a more differentiated understanding of time as chronos and kairos. Finally, the paper outlines a research agenda based on the components of the framework: time frame, structure, and dynamics.
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... However, the temporal structure of events (e.g., touchpoints/encounters, episodes) within contexts needs further research (Nenninger and Dyck, 2022). ...
... Hence, characteristics tie in with context as characteristics depict a control panel for structuring and orchestrating events (e.g., touchpoints, episodes). How touchpoints, episodes, and the journey relate to each other in terms of mutual influence on CX dynamics needs further investigation (Nenninger and Dyck, 2022). ...
Purpose
The quality of the customer journey has become a critical determinant of successful service delivery in contemporary business. Extant journey research focuses on the customer path to purchase, but pays less attention to the touchpoints related to service delivery and consumption that are key for understanding customer experiences in service-intensive contexts. The purpose of this study is to conceptualize service journey quality (SJQ), develop measures for the construct and study its key outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach
The study uses a discovery-oriented research approach to conceptualize SJQ by synthesizing theory and field-based insights from customer focus group discussions. Next, using consumer survey data ( N = 278) from the financial services context, the authors develop measures for the SJQ. Finally, based on an additional survey dataset ( N = 239), the authors test the nomological validity and predictive relevance of the SJQ.
Findings
SJQ comprises of three dimensions: (1) journey seamlessness, (2) journey personalization and (3) journey coherence. This study demonstrates that SJQ is a critical driver of service quality and customer loyalty in contemporary business. This study finds that the loyalty link is partially mediated through service quality, indicating that SJQ explains loyalty above and beyond service quality.
Research limitations/implications
Since service quality only partially mediates the link between service journey quality and customer loyalty, future studies should examine alternative mediators, such as customer experience, for a more comprehensive understanding of the performance effects.
Practical implications
The study offers concrete tools for service managers who wish to understand and develop the quality of service journeys.
Originality/value
This study advances the service journey concept, demonstrates that the quality of the service journey is a critical driver of customer performance and provides rigorous journey constructs for future service research.
Our study summarizes and synthesizes the content of our Special Issue along with additional information from customer experience (hereafter CX) managers and research to determine the main challenges and opportunities for the most important trend in CX practice and research alike: CX's dynamic nature. While widely acknowledged, CX researchers and managers have been struggling with how to research, address, and successfully manage CX's dynamic nature. Individual contributions build the foundation for our study, establishing a conceptual framework within which to successfully address the four main challenges at hand: time, the role of emotions, personal experience vicinity, and methods. We present guiding research directions and questions emphasizing fruitful avenues of enquiry.
In response to initial voices that put the customer experience (management) (CX(M) hereafter) movement into question, this paper aims to introduce a formal nomenclature to push the CX(M) field toward a more mature state. First, drawing from an inductive analysis of 143 CX(M) papers, the authors identify twelve basic CX components which aggregate into three overarching building blocks - touchpoints (T – i.e., points of interaction between the customer and brand/firm), context (C – i.e., situationally available resources internal and/or external to the customer), and qualities (Q – i.e., attributes that reflect the nature of customer responses and reactions to interactions with the brand/firm). The TCQ nomenclature offers a language to make CX actionable, moving beyond the breadth of the current definition and frameworks by disentangling CX into small bite-sized chunks (i.e., the CX components) that any academic and practitioner, regardless of their discipline, may understand and use to discuss and manage CX. Second, using the TCQ nomenclature, the authors assess the current state of the CX(M) literature and identify mature (e.g., firm-controlled touchpoints and cognitive and emotional qualities associated with CX) and underdeveloped (e.g., non-firm controlled touchpoints and the market and environmental context in which CX emerges) areas ripe for future research. In addition, they also provide a set of recommendations to strengthen the methodological rigor of the field. Third, the TCQ nomenclature may support managers in auditing their current CXM practices and/or serve as a basis for CX design and innovation.
Video-Presentation: https://youtu.be/lyEoHRP1jE0
Paper available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-019-00718-x
Customer experience is a key marketing concept, yet the growing number of studies focused on this topic has led to considerable fragmentation and theoretical confusion. To move the field forward, this article develops a set of fundamental premises that reconcile contradictions in research on customer experience and provide integrative guideposts for future research. A systematic review of 136 articles identifies eight literature fields that address customer experience. The article then compares the phenomena and metatheoretical assumptions prevalent in each field to establish a dual classification of research traditions that study customer experience as responses to either (1) managerial stimuli or (2) consumption processes. By analyzing the compatibility of these research traditions through a metatheoretical lens, this investigation derives four fundamental premises of customer experience that are generalizable across settings and contexts. These premises advance the conceptual development of customer experience by defining its core conceptual domain and providing guidelines for further research.
Knowledge production within the field of business research is accelerating at a tremendous speed while at the same time remaining fragmented and interdisciplinary. This makes it hard to keep up with state-of-the-art and to be at the forefront of research, as well as to assess the collective evidence in a particular area of business research. This is why the literature review as a research method is more relevant than ever. Traditional literature reviews often lack thoroughness and rigor and are conducted ad hoc, rather than following a specific methodology. Therefore, questions can be raised about the quality and trustworthiness of these types of reviews. This paper discusses literature review as a methodology for conducting research and offers an overview of different types of reviews, as well as some guidelines to how to both conduct and evaluate a literature review paper. It also discusses common pitfalls and how to get literature reviews published.
Service failures represent temporary or permanent interruptions of the customer’s regular service experience. Although the literature identifies an extensive set of organizational alternatives for recovering from service failures, researchers have approached these responses as discrete organizational actions that are loosely connected to the dynamic nature of the recovery experience. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by introducing the idea of the service recovery journey (SRJ). We first conceptualize the SRJ as the outcome of a service failure that is composed of three phases: pre-recovery, recovery, and post-recovery. We then synthesize the organizational responses to service failures reported in 230 journal articles and integrate them with the novel SRJ perspective. Thereafter, we provide an extensive set of questions for future research that will expand our knowledge about the pre-recovery, recovery, and post-recovery phases, and address the interaction between the customer’s regular journey and the SRJ. Finally, we outline six considerations for recovery research seeking to affect business practice and discuss the managerial implications of adopting an SRJ perspective.
Based on in-depth interviews with nine tattoo consumers, participant observation at a tattoo studio, a tattoo consumption diary, and photography, we investigate embodied processes of remembering and forgetting temporal experiences. We unpick participants’ experiences of combatting the fragility of memory, negotiating which temporal experiences to remember or forget, and constructing temporal order through their tattooed bodies. These insights are enriched theoretically with reference to Ricoeur’s ideas concerning time, narrative, and memory. By focusing upon the embodied dimensions of memory work, we contribute fresh insights into the underexplored relations between bodies, time, and consumer culture. Furthermore, we indicate the continuing significance of temporal continuity, durability, and the past in accelerating Western cultures. Finally, we elucidate the importance of also attending to “absences” in consumer research. We conclude by considering the wider implications of our findings for better understanding an accelerating, liquid, and unstable consumer culture, beyond the context of tattooing.
Purpose
This article sets out to explore the experience design phenomenon in the cultural sector. Specifically, it purports to articulate a set of design characteristics that support the alignment between an organisation’s design intention (i.e. intended experience) and the actual experience of customers (i.e. realised experience).
Design/methodology/approach
A single case study approach is adopted to explore the phenomenon from both the provider and customer perspectives simultaneously. A range of qualitative data, including 42 interviews with managers and customers as well as voluminous documentary evidence, are collected. Provider and customer data are analysed independently using a rigorous inductive analytical process to generate experience design themes and to assess possible gaps between intended and realised experience.
Findings
The findings reveal the design characteristics of touchpoints and the overall customer journey, which constitute the core experience, as well as the design characteristics of the physical and social environment, which support the realisation of the core experience, in a cultural context.
Research limitations/implications
Limitations include difficulties in generalising the findings from a single case and in claiming that the set of design characteristics identified is exhaustive.
Practical implications
The paper makes several recommendations that are useful and relevant for customer experience practitioners in the cultural sector.
Originality/value
The paper’s contribution is to provide novel empirical insights into the four experience design areas of touchpoints, journey, physical elements and social elements in an experience-centric cultural context. On that basis, a conceptual framework for experience design in the cultural context is proposed.
Service researchers have emphasized the importance of studying the service experience, which encompasses multiple service encounters. Although the reflection on a series of service encounters has increased, the scope of research in this space remains narrow. Service research has traditionally concentrated on understanding, measuring and optimizing the core service delivery. While this focused lens has generated extraordinary knowledge and moved service research and practice forward, it has also resulted in a narrowly focused research field. The authors present a framework to guide comprehensive service experience research. Broadly, they define (1) pre-core service encounter, (2) core service encounter, and (3) post-core service encounter as distinct periods within a service experience. Further, they review the literature and put forward important research questions to be addressed within and across these periods. Finally, they argue that researchers need to consider simultaneously all periods of the service experience to make valuable contributions to the literature.
How can we comprehend people who pay for an experience marketed as painful? On one hand, consumers spend billions of dollars every year to alleviate different kinds of pain. On the other hand, millions of individuals participate in extremely painful leisure pursuits. In trying to understand this conundrum, we ethnographi-cally study a popular adventure challenge where participants subject themselves to electric shocks, fire, and freezing water. Through sensory intensification, pain brings the body into sharp focus, allowing individuals to rediscover their corporeal-ity. In addition, painful extraordinary experiences operate as regenerative escapes from the self. By flooding the consciousness with gnawing unpleasantness, pain provides a temporary relief from the burdens of self-awareness. Finally, when leaving marks and wounds, pain helps consumers create the story of a fulfilled life. In a context of decreased physicality, market operators play a major role in selling pain to the saturated selves of knowledge workers, who use pain as a way to simultaneously escape reflexivity and craft their life narrative.
Over the last three decades, customer experience (CE) has developed from a burgeoning concept to a widely recognized phenomenon in terms of both research and practice. To account for the complexity of consumption decisions, the CE literature encompasses both the rational information processing approach to consumer decision-making and the experiential approach, which includes emotions, feelings and sub-consciousness. The authors classify and examine CE research on two levels. Studies on static CE analyze experiences during touchpoints at one point in time, while studies on dynamic CE assess how experiences evolve over time. Furthermore, both static and dynamic CE research take place from two distinct theoretical perspectives: the organization and the consumer. As both theoretical perspectives essentially deal with the same phenomenon – the organizational perspective with the creation of CEs and the consumer perspective with the perception of customer experiences – there is potential for a productive symbiosis between them. The authors propose that connecting insights from both perspectives can contribute to a better understanding of what constitutes a CE for consumers and how firms can effectively manage it. First, the authors discuss the development of CE and argue that it has evolved into a broad and fragmented ‘umbrella construct’. Second, after distinguishing and defining static and dynamic CE, they systematically evaluate the state of knowledge in both the organizational and consumer perspectives. Finally, they develop an agenda for future research that integrates the consumer perspective into organizational CE research.
The notion of consumption experience still suffers from a lack of conceptualization. This inductive study, based on the analysis of life narratives, is an attempt to remedy the problem. It identifies four dimensions of a consumption experience. The «praxeological» dimension is action related. The «hedonico-sensorial» dimension concerns a sensorial and thymic evaluation of the context. The «rhetoric» dimension deals with the meaning of an experience. The fourth dimension highlights the relationship with time. These dimensions contribute to a better conceptualization of an experience through remembrance and consequently to closer contact with the client. They can be considered as levers for action to create or strengthen the competitive edge attached to an experience offer.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to provide directions for future research on: broadening the role of customers in customer experience; taking a practice-based approach to customer experience; and recognizing the holistic, dynamic nature of customer experience across all touch points and over time.
Design/methodology/approach
– The approach is conceptual identifying current gaps in research on customer experience.
Findings
– The findings include a set of research questions and research agenda for future research on customer experience.
Originality/value
– This research suggests fresh perspectives for understanding the customer experience which can inspire future research and advance theory and managerial practice.
The current paradigm of time in the marketing literature is one where time is linear, quantifiable and predominantly chronological in nature. This is merely one construct of one aspect of time and a construct that is largely specific to a western, industrialized society. The associated theory of time allocation assumes individuals seek to compress time‐consuming activities. Time compression and the speeding‐up of activities are a current feature of both consumer and industrial marketing. Discusses other constructs of time, drawn from the fields of sociology, psychology and anthropology. Time is two concepts, duration and succession. Time can be cyclical rather than linear and is seen as such within concepts such as the product life cycle. It can also be episodic, as in the celebration of events. Questions whether time is ever truly linear, as our perception of duration varies with the content of the activities that fill that duration. This suggests an alternative to time compression, to fill empty time so as to make duration appear faster. Discusses the limitations of current theory and concepts. Suggests a relativistic approach of describing or scoping time‐consuming activities as an alternative towards developing a more universal understanding of time allocation. Argues that progress is needed in the area to meet the needs of a society where time in general and leisure time in particular are ever more significant.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to examine customers’ use experiences in a smartphone application (app) context. Apps have emerged as popular tools among marketing practitioners. In service research, however, smartphone apps, and their customers’ use experiences, have received limited attention.
Design/methodology/approach
– This paper provides a conceptual overview and draws on an empirical two-phase study comprising diary narratives of using a specific app and semi-structured interviews on the use of multiple apps by app users.
Findings
– Results show that indirect use experiences play an important role in the holistic service experience. Compared with direct experiences, indirect use experiences do not require the actual use of apps or direct contact with the user. Also the context, such as the time and location of app use, is important for both direct and indirect use experience.
Research limitations/implications
– This paper highlights indirect use experiences as a vital component of service experiences and encourages researchers not to restrict use experiences to direct use only. Indirect use experiences enable managers to gain deep insights into the everyday use experiences of current and potential customers.
Originality/value
– First, previous research on service experience has mainly focused on direct use experiences. This study highlights that indirect use experiences are an important part of the service experience. Second, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first attempt to investigate the use experiences of smartphone apps in a service marketing context.
Purpose
– The collective, interactive aspects of service experience are increasingly evident in contemporary research and practice, but no integrative analysis of this phenomenon has been conducted until now. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize service experience co-creation and examines its implications for research and practice.
Design/methodology/approach
– To map the multi-approach research area of service experience co-creation, the study draws on literature in the fields of service management, service-dominant logic and service logic, consumer culture theory, and service innovation and design, together with invited commentaries by prominent scholars.
Findings
– A conceptualization is developed for “service experience co-creation,” and multiple dimensions of the concept are identified. It is postulated that service experience co-creation has wider marketing implications, in terms of understanding experiential value creation and foundational sociality in contemporary markets, as well as in the renewal of marketing methods and measures.
Research limitations/implications
– The authors call for cross-field research on service experience, extending current contextual and methodological reach. Researchers are urged to study the implications of increasing social interaction for service experience co-creation, and to assist managers in coping with and leveraging the phenomenon.
Practical implications
– For practitioners, this analysis demonstrates the complexity of service experience co-creation and provides insights on the aspects they should monitor and facilitate.
Originality/value
– As the first integrative analysis and conceptualization of service experience co-creation, this paper advances current understanding on the topic, argues for its wider relevance, and paves the way for its future development.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to explore how financial services (FS) organizations manage the customer experience. It aims to establish what practices are used, to articulate the role of the FS context in influencing the choice of practices, and to identify how these practices support experience co-creation from the perspective of the organization.
Design/methodology/approach
– The authors adopt a multiple case study approach. In total, 23 cases provide a rich understanding of the phenomenon studied which permits grounding the findings on robust data.
Findings
– The authors identify five practices that are consistently used by FS organizations to manage the customer experience. The findings suggest that four industry-specific characteristics affect the choice of these practices. The results also reveal how these practices support the co-creation of the customer experience.
Research limitations/implications
– The authors focus on the FS context only, do not examine the impact of the practices on performance, and do not explore experience co-creation from the perspective of the customer.
Practical implications
– Adopting these practices can facilitate a more co-created customer experience, which in turn can provide FS organizations with a competitive differentiator.
Originality/value
– The paper advances current knowledge by revealing five customer experience management practices that are specific to the FS context. Moreover, this is one of the first studies to explore experience co-creation from the perspective of the organization and to identify ways in which organizations can support customers in co-creating the experiences.
While the importance of the temporal dimension for both positive and negative consumption experiences has been well understood, no general theory exists to explain how consumers’ temporal experiences come about. We theorize temporal experiences as an effect of performing consumption practices in order to move from assessing isolated contextual variables to a more holistic understanding. The timeflow of a practice is defined as its ability to evoke an experienced temporality that cannot be reduced to either subjective “inner” time or cosmic “outer” time. On the basis of a longitudinal ethnography of temporality in two lifestyle sports—freeskiing and paintball—we find that five practice elements shape temporal experience: material set-up, bodily routines and skills, teleoaffective structures, rules, and cultural understandings. Misalignments of practice elements induce experiences of temporal drag or rush associated with experiences such as boredom and stress. We contribute to prior research on consumption experiences, waiting, and servicescapes.
In this article, we introduce the concept of the service delivery network (SDN) defined as two or more organizations that, in the eyes of the customer, are responsible for the provision of a connected overall service experience. This responds to calls for frameworks recognizing that dyadic service encounters are embedded in the series of experiences customers have with complementary providers as part of the journey to achieve their desired goals. Adopting an SDN perspective presents a dramatically different set of challenges for managers and provides research opportunities challenging the current view of established service concepts. Managers must recognize that to better serve the customer they need to understand the role that they play in the customer-defined service journey and be prepared to coordinate their activities with complementary providers. Participating in helping build and manage the SDN for the customer, or understanding how they fit into customer’s self-designed SDN, becomes a central challenge, often requiring firms to develop a new set of capabilities. The SDN also challenges the way we view many of the core concepts in service research, which are anchored in the dyadic view. This provides considerable opportunity for future inquiry. We present a series of research questions, inspired by the SDN, organized into categories including building cooperative and collaborative networks, customer cocreation, systems thinking, customer relationship management, managing service failure and recovery, building capabilities, and customer-to-customer interactions.
This article introduces the consumer job journey as a more holistic perspective by which to understand consumption journeys undertaken to acquire and use goods and services. It aids scholars and managers by helping make evident some key consumer decisions and behaviors that otherwise would be invisible. Four tenets lay the foundation for the concept of a consumer job journey, establishing some key differences relative to a traditional perspective on consumption journeys. A consumer job journey involves a sequence of goal-directed steps (and associated evaluative criteria) in pursuit of an overall job and the consumer actions directed by these steps to acquire, assemble, and integrate market and nonmarket resources. Propositions highlight the consumer’s role as an active project manager who continually adapts their resource configuration given job journey goal priorities, psychological tensions, and disruptions. In combination, the tenets and propositions highlight both research gaps and unique managerial implications.
Brand experience is conceptualized as sensations, feelings, cognitions, and behavioral responses evoked by brand-related stimuli that are part of a brand's design and identity, packaging, communications, and environments. The authors distinguish several experience dimensions and construct a brand experience scale that includes four dimensions: sensory, affective, intellectual, and behavioral. In six studies, the authors show that the scale is reliable, valid, and distinct from other brand measures, including brand evaluations, brand involvement, brand attachment, customer delight, and brand personality. Moreover, brand experience affects consumer satisfaction and loyalty directly and indirectly through brand personality associations.
This paper explores the benefits of measuring emotions and their dynamic nature during the customer experience with neurophysiological measures. In this study, emotions are measured during a service interaction (with self-service technology or a human employee) going through a series of touchpoints, including a service failure. We show that creating a loyalty card with the help of a service employee or self-service technology did not impact customers’ perceived service satisfaction and their behavioral intentions. This paper demonstrates that neurophysiological measures such as Galvanic Skin Response might be better equipped to unveil the dynamic nature of emotions (e.g., arousal) during the customer experience and that valence measured by neurophysiological tools (using electroencephalography) better reconciles with the effect found for satisfaction and behavioral intentions. Our findings have implications for both researchers and practitioners who want to understand and bolster customer experiences, thereby taking customer emotions and its appropriate measurement tools into consideration.
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.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to examine the effects of different touch points on customer experience, second, effects of customer experience on loyalty intentions, and actual spend, and third, the moderating role of motivation orientation on these effects.
Design/methodology/approach
By recognizing the importance of capturing customer experience assessments at the “time of the experience”, a smartphone technology mobile app was developed for the purpose of this study. Real time customer experience data were collected at individual touch points.
Findings
The results show that the real-time touch point evaluations significantly effect overall customer experience and that these effects significantly differ for utilitarian and hedonic motivation orientations. The effects of technology, atmospherics, employee–customer interaction and service/product interaction touch points on overall customer experience are significantly stronger for hedonic orientation than for utilitarian orientation. In contrast, the effect of process touch point on overall customer experience is significantly stronger for utilitarian than hedonic orientation. Also, favorable overall customer experience evaluations exert significant positive influence on loyalty intentions, and actual spend, and these influences are significantly stronger for consumers with hedonic than utilitarian motivation orientations.
Practical implications
The findings of this study will enable companies to manage customer experience programs effectively by providing an understanding of the distinct touch points that occur along the customer journey and the relative importance of each of these touch points in enhancing customer experience.
Originality/value
This is the first empirical study that offers important insights on the effects of different touch points on customer experience, and on the moderating role of consumer motivation orientations on the touch points – customer experience – loyalty link by using real-time data.
In these days of overwhelming clinical work, decreased resources, and increased educational demands, time has become a priceless commodity. Competency-based medical education attempts to address this challenge by increasing educational efficiency and decreasing the "steeping" of learners in clinical activities for set durations of time. However, in this environment, how does one teach for compassionate, humanistic practice? The answer arguably lies in clinician teachers' recognition and engagement in a different type of time, that of kairos.Ancient Greek thought held that there were two interrelated types of time: chronological, linear, quantitative time-chronos-and qualitative, opportune time-kairos. Unlike chronos, kairos involves a sense of the "right time," the "critical moment," the proportionate amount. Developing a sense of kairos involves learning to apply general principles to unique situations lacking certainty and acting proportionally to need and context. Educationally, it implies intervening at the critical moment-the moment in which a thoughtful question, comment, or personal expression of perplexity, awe, or wonder can trigger reflection, dialogue, and an opening up of perspectives on the human dimensions of illness and medical care. A sensibility to kairos involves an awareness of what makes a moment "teachable," an understanding of chance, opportunity, and potential for transformation. Above all, inviting kairos means grasping an opportunity to immerse oneself and one's learners-even momentarily-into an exploration of patients and their stories, perspectives, challenges, and lives.
Purpose
As an interdisciplinary and applied discipline, managerial relevance has always been at the forefront of service research. This viewpoint article synthesizes the main ideas presented in one of the 10th SERVSIG conference panels by three practitioners about what they view as the biggest opportunities/challenges they face and two journal editors on current academic research priorities. The purpose of this study is to use this panel as a starting point to bridge more closely the world of academia with practice and propose a collection of recommendations toward this goal.
Design/methodology/approach
This study synthesizes the academic and practitioner viewpoints presented and research conducted into research priorities.
Findings
Although there is significant overlap in what is deemed important by the presenting academics and practitioners, there are some important differences when it comes to issues deemed important, how they are articulated and the language that is used.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the literature and practitioner community by summarizing the viewpoints of the two sides and curating a collection of existing approaches and new recommendations to more closely bridge academic and practitioner perspectives.
An inspection of time-related research in marketing documents two dominant conceptualizations of time: objective time and subjective time. Objective time is straightforward, and refers to clock time. In contrast, subjective time is quite nuanced and refers to the differential experience and perception of time. Recognizing this distinction, a number of scholars have suggested that the marketing discipline relies upon objective time, and as a result, does not have a fully developed understanding of time. Conducting a historical assessment of time, we demonstrate that marketing has a conceptually-bounded view of time. We develop a conceptual framework that reconceptualizes time as objective and subjective and as experienced by multiple referents, and develop research propositions that highlight the importance of integrating a broadened view of time into marketing research, recognizing that we are better off thinking about time as objective time and subjective time. We conclude with a discussion highlighting future research opportunities.
This paper defines hedonic consumption as those facets of consumer behavior that relate to the multisensory, fantasy and emotive aspects of product usage experience. After delineating these concepts, their theoretical antecedents are traced, followed by a discussion of differences between the traditional and hedonic views, methodological implications of the latter approach, and behavioral propositions in four substantive areas relevant to hedonic consumption—mental constructs, product classes, product usage and individual differences. Conclusions concern the usefulness of the hedonic perspective in supplementing and extending marketing research on consumer behavior.
Companies strive to enhance customer experiences and to foster positive consumer behaviors. While there is extensive literature on how to create enjoyable and conducive customer experiences, limited research focuses on memories associated with shopping experiences. However, the decision to repeat an experience is based more on the memory of that experience than on the actual experience itself. The current research draws on a series of qualitative and quantitative studies to develop and to validate the four-dimensional Shopping Experience Memory Scale (SEMS). Findings suggest that the scale's four dimensions – attraction, structure, affect, and social – are reliable and consistent across different consumption environments (in-store, mall, and online) and across different time intervals. SEMS reflects nuances of memory and of experience constructs forming the basis of theoretical and practical contributions in the ability to assess the progression of memory associated with shopping experiences over time.
Keywords
Shopping experienceMemory of shopping experienceShopping Experience Memory Scale (SEMS)Customer experienceScale development
In this paper, which is empirically grounded in ethnographic research conducted among persons living in Norway without legal permission, we explore the temporal dimensions of irregular migration. In the first half, we consider the time aspects of migration control. In particular, we examine the politicization of time within the host of b/ordering policies, practices, and processes through which migrant irregularity is produced and governed in the Norwegian welfare state. We then move into a discussion of migrant irregularity as it is subjectively experienced, in which we solicit time as fundamental unit of analysis with the potential to render phenomenologically intelligible irregularity as it is lived and negotiated. In doing so, we draw upon two classical Greek concepts of time, chronos and kairos, and we consider the conditions of limitation and possibility for reckoning as meaningful experiences of and in time. This entails an exploration of the ways in which the research participants had emplotted their experiences within narratives that they, in retrospect, recalled having crafted at various points in their lives, and of the existential dilemmas that they confronted when these narratives could no longer be sustained. Ultimately, these endeavors produce an analysis of both these meaning-making strategies and what might be understood as the unique temporalities of irregular migration, as it is produced and governed, lived and embodied, and potentially also renegotiated and transformed.
The consumer Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to revolutionize consumer experience. Because consumers can actively interact with smart objects, the traditional, human-centric conceptualization of consumer experience as consumers' internal subjective responses to branded objects may not be sufficient to conceptualize consumer experience in the IoT. Smart objects possess their own unique capacities and their own kinds of experiences in interaction with the consumer and each other. A conceptual framework based on assemblage theory and objectoriented ontology details how consumer experience and object experience emerge in the IoT. This conceptualization is anchored in the context of consumerobject assemblages, and defines consumer experience by its emergent properties, capacities, and agentic and communal roles expressed in interaction. Four specific consumer experience assemblages emerge: enabling experiences, comprising agentic self-extension and communal self-expansion, and constraining experiences, comprising agentic self-restriction and communal self-reduction. A parallel conceptualization of the construct of object experience argues that it can be accessed by consumers through object-oriented anthropomorphism, a nonhuman-centric approach to evaluating the expressive roles objects play in interaction. Directions for future research are derived, and consumer researchers are invited to join a dialogue about the important themes underlying our framework. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
This book seeks to arrive at a better understanding of the relationships between the objective and subjective aspects of time. It discusses the existence of fluent time, a controversial concept in many areas, from philosophy to physics. Fluent time is understood as directional time with a past, a present, and a future. We experience fluent time in our lives and we adopt a temporal perspective in our ways of knowing and acting. Nevertheless, the existence of fluent time has been debated for both philosophical and scientific reasons, thus creating a rift between the subjective and objective aspects of time. Starting from the basic notion of points of view, or perspectives, this book explores the relationships between objective or external time, as it has been conceptualized by science, and subjective or internal time, which is involved in our lived experiences. It establishes a general framework encompassing the nature, structure and mode of existence of points of view, in which the objective and subjective aspects of time can be integrated. The book mainly addresses researchers and postgraduates in philosophy and logic. Additionally, it offers inspiration for physicists and computer scientists involved in the modeling and simulation of complex behaviors for which the representation of internal time should be considered together with the notion of objective, external time.
Studies of nostalgia are one of the research subfields of recalled consumption experiences. In addition to the nostalgic recall, the consumers' remembered experiences situate in other temporal frames, a theme rarely touched in the extant research. The aim of this research was to examine the differences between nostalgic and other recalled consumption experiences by identifying and analysing the characteristics of the temporal frames. The data set for this task comprised 480 descriptions of consumers' experiences involving an everyday consumer object. An interpretive approach was utilised to analyse the temporal frames. The results of the study indicate that the consumers described their memories in four temporal structures. These are the strong nostalgia from childhood, light nostalgia from youth, descriptions of recent past, and memories linked to consumption practices and traditions that will be fostered in the future. The article proposes a conceptual framework describing the temporal frames of consumers' remembered consumption experiences that opens further avenues for research alongside of nostalgic recall. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Purpose
This research aims to better understand customer experience, as it relates to customer commitment and provides a framework for future research into the intersection of these emerging streams of research.
Design/methodology/approach
This research contributes to theoretical and practical perspectives on customer experience and its measurement by integrating extant literature with customer commitment and customer satisfaction literature.
Findings
The breadth of the domains that encompass customer experience – cognitive, emotional, physical, sensorial and social – makes simplistic metrics impossible for gauging the entirety of customers’ experiences. These findings provide strong support of the need for new research into customer experience and customer commitment.
Practical implications
Given the complexity of customer experience, managers are unlikely to track and manage all relevant elements of the concept. This research provides a framework identifying empirically the most salient attributes of customer experience with particular emphasis on those elements that enhance commitment. This offers insight into service design to correspond with specific commitment and experience dimensions.
Originality/value
This research is the first to examine the customer experience as it relates to customer commitment – a key factor in customer loyalty, positive word of mouth and other desired outcomes for managers and marketers. This paper provides a framework for future research into these emerging topics.
The most salient or peak aspect of a service experience often defines customer perceptions of the service. Across two studies, using the same novel form of a scenario-based experiment, we investigate the design of peak events in a service sequence by testing how anticipated and surprised peaks influence customer perceptions. Study 1 captures the immediate reactions of participants and Study 2 surveys participants a week later. In both studies we find a main effect for the temporal peak placement, confirming the positive influence of a strong peak ending. When assessing the peak design strategies of surprise and anticipation, we find in Study 1 that surprise and anticipation moderates the temporal peak placement (e.g., early peak versus late peak) on overall customer perceptions, with the surprise peak at the end of an experience yielding the strongest effect. In Study 2 we see that the remembered experience of a surprise peak positively affects customer perceptions compared to an anticipated peak regardless of the temporal placement of the peak. We also find that the infusion of a surprise peak ending has a lasting effect that amplifies the peak-end effect of remembered experiences. Drawing on these findings, we discuss the role of surprise, anticipation, and sequence effects in experience design strategy. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to review customer experience formation (CXF) by first locating and analyzing how researchers approach CXF in the service literature and the theoretical underpinnings of these approaches, and then assessing which approaches are best suited for understanding, facilitating, and examining CXF in today’s service landscape.
Design/methodology/approach
This study systematically reviews 163 articles published between 1998 and 2015 in the service field.
Findings
This study illustrates how researchers approach CXF on the individual level by applying stimulus- interaction- or sense-making-based perspectives. These reflect researchers’ theoretical underpinnings for how individuals realize the customer experience within environmental, social, and temporal contexts through intermediation. Researchers further apply contextual lenses, including the dyadic and service- or customer-ecosystem lenses, which reflect their theoretical underpinnings for explaining how various actor constellations and contextual boundaries frame individual-level CXF. Finally, this study shows why the sense-making-based perspective, together with a service- or customer-ecosystem lens, is particularly suitable for approaching complex CXF in today’s service settings.
Research limitations/implications
To advance theory, researchers should choose the approaches resonant with their research problem and worldview but also consider that today’s complex service landscape favors holistic and systemic approaches over atomistic and dyadic ones.
Practical implications
This study provides managers with recommendations for understanding, facilitating, and evaluating contemporary CXF.
Originality/value
This study advances the understanding of CXF by systematically reviewing its multiple layers, approaches, and dimensions and the opportunities and challenges of each approach.
Understanding customer experience and the customer journey over time is critical for firms. Customers now interact with firms through myriad touch points in multiple channels and media, and customer experiences are more social in nature. These changes require firms to integrate multiple business functions, and even external partners, in creating and delivering positive customer experiences. In this article, the authors aim to develop a stronger understanding of customer experience and the customer journey in this era of increasingly complex customer behavior. To achieve this goal, they examine existing definitions and conceptualizations of customer experience as a construct and provide a historical perspective of the roots of customer experience within marketing. Next, they attempt to bring together what is currently known about customer experience, customer journeys, and customer experience management. Finally, they identify critical areas for future research on this important topic.
In this paper, the authors identify the elements that encompass customer experience touch points. This research was based on a qualitative research approach, using a sequential incident technique to guide the data collection. An inductive thematic analysis of the semi-structure interview transcripts, collected from customer narratives of experiences with retailers, was employed to identify distinct elements of customer experience touch points. The findings uncovered seven distinct elements of customer experience touch points, which include; atmospheric, technological, communicative, process, employee–customer interaction, customer–customer interaction and product interaction elements. The findings highlight that multichannel retail touch points are made up of varying combinations of the identified elements. The study offers a comprehensive understanding of customer experience; one that will help retailers to orchestrate the customer experience at individual touch points.
Through six studies set in a range of service contexts, we show that consumers perceive the passage of wait time through intrinsic changes in the service experience. Changes, either in service progress speed or in activities within service experiences, consistently influence the perception of wait time. Further, the effects of change on time perception depend on whether the judgment is made prospectively or retrospectively. Results relating to change in progress speeds (Studies 1–3) demonstrate that faster progress during the start of an event shortens prospective time judgments; conversely, quicker progress at the end of a service experience shortens retrospective time judgments. We also demonstrate that prospective time judgments decrease, and retrospective judgments increase, when there is greater change in activities during the service experience (Studies 4–5). Extending this line of inquiry, we explore how within-experience activity change—in terms of the number of segments and how similar the segment activities are—impact retrospective time judgments (Study 6). Taken together, our findings therefore suggest a means (by managing changes in speed or activity within a service experience) of prolonging or quickening time perceptions that can be applied to service contexts to manage consumers’ wait time judgments.
In the quest for better service design, hospitality and service firms have often been frustrated to find that service experiences that are based on what customers say they want are not always successful. A psychological analysis of this phenomenon suggests the following premises: (1) Customers' memory of an experience fades quickly; (2) customers' memory of an experience comprises many sub-experiences; (3) customers' memories of experiences are multidimensional and unintuitive; and (4) consumers cannot accurately predict what they will learn or remember. The goal of an experience design is to create a series of sub-experiences that will "stick" with the customer. This "sticktion" analysis is applied to the practical challenge of redesigning the customer experience at Pizza Hut UK. This consumer research provides a test of the four premises and an application of the underlying sticktion principles. Surveys of Pizza Hut customers found that the existing experience had its bright spots but was generally forgettable. Not only could customers not predict what they would remember about the experience, but one week after visiting the restaurant, the customers also filled in memory gaps with details that did not appear on their initial description of the visit. Even more troublesome was the fact that the invented details tended to be negative. To fill these gaps, the researchers tested specific aspects of the experience that would "stick" and included those in the new restaurant concepts. Using this approach, the chain was able to roll out new concepts that met with initial favorable results.
Experience is a new and exciting concept marketing academia and practice. This monograph reviews the various meanings of experience as the term is used in philosophy, psychology, and in consumer behavior and marketing. I will discuss the key concepts of experience marketing such as experiential value, different types of experiences, the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary experiences and experience touchpoints. I will also review the empirical findings that provide consumer insights on experiences - such as how experiences are remembered, whether positive and negative experiences can co-exist, how experiential attributes are processed and whether experiences are rational. Practical frameworks for managing and marketing experiences will be discussed. I will conclude with an exploration of how experience marketing can contribute to customer happiness.
Purpose
Service scholars have questioned the usefulness of the concept of tangibility/intangibility as a characteristic of services for two reasons: first, it is ambiguous and does not differentiate between services and goods; and second, because all offerings, despite their characteristics, render service to customers. Consequently, scholars have suggested discarding the concept altogether. The purpose of this paper is to subject the concept to critical evaluation and argue that tangibility/intangibility is useful, because it influences consumers' experiences with offerings. In this paper, the authors argue that it is necessary to re‐conceptualise tangibility/intangibility to overcome the previous critique.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors draw upon empirical research from the service marketing and psychology literature in order to advance knowledge on the nature of tangibility/intangibility and its influence on the formation of consumer experiences.
Findings
It is proposed that tangibility/intangibility should be investigated from a consumer perspective, rather than an inherent characteristic in offerings. Also, it is shown that the concept is relevant for understanding consumer experience formation at different stages of the purchase process.
Originality/value
The paper provides propositions on the conceptualization of tangibility/intangibility and its relationship with pre‐, ongoing use and post‐purchase consumer experiences. The authors call for caution in dismissing tangibility/intangibility as a concept in the service marketing literature.
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Purpose - The aim of this paper is to investigate customer perceptions of their own contribution to service provision, in order to enhance our understanding of customer contribution and its dimensions.
Design/methodology/approach - 27 in-depth interviews were conducted across nine service contexts. Qualitative data were then analyzed to identify the various dimensions of customer contribution.
Findings - Firstly, the study contributes to the understanding of customer contribution in identifying physical, mental, and emotional dimensions. The physical and mental dimensions of customer contribution are represented by activities, while emotions comprise mood and emotional states. Secondly, relationships among the three dimensions were identified; in particular, physical and mental activities were found to influence customer emotions. Thirdly, the findings reveal that customer understanding of their own contribution to service provision encompass the co-creative sphere of customer and provider, and extends to the customer-sphere before the service encounter.
Research limitations/implications - The qualitative study is limited in terms of generalizability, since the 27 interview cases were based on nine interviews each covering three service settings. Further research is needed to investigate how the dimensions of customer contribution are linked to different outcomes (e.g., service value, satisfaction, loyalty), thus providing a quantitative validation of our findings.
Practical implications - Understanding the customer contribution to service provision is pivotal for service design. Service managers need to reflect on how the different dimensions of contribution manifest in their existing or potential service offering, since physical and mental customer activities shape their emotions, which in turn impact on the service experience and value.
Originality/value - Little in-depth research has been conducted on the nature and dimensionality of customer contributions to service provision, particularly with regard to perceptions of their own contribution. Most previous empirical research on customer contribution is limited to a specific context and concerned with customer behaviors. Hence, this qualitative study examines customer contribution across different service context, focusing on customer perceptions in terms of physical, mental, and emotional contributions to service provision.