Index of Paper Presentations for the Parallel Sessions - Academy of ...

Distinctive: Customer experience is a major source of differentiation and competitive advantage (Schmitt, 1999).Each experience is unique, resulting out of internal, subjective and personal evaluation by a customer. The need foruniqueness is strongly felt by both the retailer as well as customer. In a study of fashion stores it was found that storedesign and store environment give a unique personality or distinctiveness to the store. It was further observed thatother factors such as corporate social responsibility, reputation, service level, the salespeople, the merchandise sold,price/quality perceptions and the consumer base determine perceptions of ―genuineness‖, ―solidity‖,―sophistication‖, ―enthusiasm‖ and ―unpleasantness‖ (Brengman and Willems, 2009). Summarizing the findings ofearlier studies, Palmer (2010) explained that experience involves progression over time, anticipation, emotionalinvolvement, and a ―uniqueness that makes an activity stand out from the ordinary‖. Successful experiences arethose that a customer finds unique, memorable and sustainable over time (Pine and Gilmore, 1998). The ability ofthe retailer to create unique and pleasurable moments keep the customers delighted during the entire process of retailexperience, and gives the retail store a distinctive image for identification and recognition.Need for measurement/ scale developmentExperience has largely been regarded as a personal and subjective phenomenon. Measurement of customerexperience has been challenging owing to complexities in description, lack of clear definition of the construct and itsdimensionalities. Studies on customer experience emphasize the need for development of a robust metrics for itsmeasurement (Verhoef et al., 2009). Some measurements are available in the related area such as Experiential ValueScale (Mathwick et al., 2001); Brand Experience Scale (Zarantonello, Schmitt and Brakus, 2007), and CustomerExperience Index (Kim et al., 2011). In the context of retailing, measures of utilitarian and hedonic shopping value(Babin et al., 1994) and retail service quality (Dabholkar et al., 1996) are commonly used. The need for developing ameasure for Retail Customer Experience was felt in the light of growing importance of customer experience inretailing.METHODOLOGY