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

Modern retail is adopting a host of strategies to attract, hold, sell more and retain customers by carefullymanaging a positive shopping experience. There are enough evidences that retail customer experience has asignificant impact on retail sales, satisfaction, loyalty, profitability, word of mouth communication, and imageformation (Donovan and Rossiter, 1982; Lucas, 1999, Turley and Milliman, 2000; Wong and Sohal, 2006; Crosbyand Johnson, 2007; Verhoef et al., 2009). Growing competition, changing customer profile and expectations,sophisticated design tools, advancement in technologies and the quest for excellence has transformed the retailorientation from transaction to experience creation.The study provides insights into the nature, structure and description of retail customer experience which mayserve as an important basis for designing strategies by retailers. It has clearly emerged from the results that retailcustomer experience is a multidimensional construct incorporating four dimensions – joy, mood, leisure, anddistinctive. Retailers‘ efforts to create a holistic experience should be able to shape customers‘ perception alongthese dimensions. Each of these dimensions requires specific strategies and tools for their effective management.Modern retailing engages the customers by carefully crafting and delivering experiential benefits to theirshoppers. All the dimensions of retail customer experience incorporate elements of cognitive, emotional, sensorialand behavioural dimension to express customers‘ responses towards retail store operations. The present study hasbeen able to identify specific dimensions of retail customer experience on which customer responses can bemeasured to ascertain the impact of retail strategy.Contributions and Managerial Implications: Creating a unique pleasurable and memorable retail customerexperience has emerged as the most important strategy for achieving competitive advantage and sustaining retailperformance. The present study makes an important contribution to the body of knowledge by developing a reliableand valid scale for measuring retail customer experience in brick and mortar stores. All the four dimensions alongwith their constituent items clearly describe the multidimensional nature of the construct suggesting directions forindustry applications and future research.