Case Studies on Food Experiences in Marketing, Retail, and Events

Susanne Doppler, Adrienne Steffen

• Publisher: Woodhead Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780128177921
• eBook ISBN: 9780128177938
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

Case Studies on Food Experiences in Marketing, Retail, and Events explores approaches for creating ideal food shopping and consumption experiences, and the challenges food customers face today. With a basis in literature review and theoretical background, the book illustrates specific case studies on food shopping experiences, food consumption experience in restaurants, and food experience and events, as well as insights on the methodological tools adopted throughout. Topics include food and food service design, the creation of customer loyalty through experiences, communication strategies like food promotion and event management, and defining product positioning in a competitive environment.This book is an excellent resource for industry professionals in the food and beverage sectors, including those who work in marketing, communication, hospitality, and management, as well as students studying business management, tourism management, event management, applied marketing, and consumer behavior.- Presents the challenges customers face in their away-from-home food shopping- Explains how customer food experiences can be created- Contains best practice examples of how food companies achieve a competitive advantage by creating memorable customer experiences

1

Introduction to the experience economy

Adrienne Steffen and Susanne Doppler, University of Applied Sciences Fresenius Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

Abstract

This chapter briefly introduces the history of customer experience management, defines the term, and refers to related research streams. The idea of hedonic consumption originally arose in the early 1980s. Since then the idea of creating a customer experience and strategically managing the customer experience has gained increasing attention to the point of becoming a popular buzzword in marketing. Today, firms want to manage the customer journey efficiently across all touchpoints to allocate resources. The chapter concludes with an outlook of the book.

Keywords

Customer experience; experience economy; customer experience management; customer journey

1.1 Introduction to the experience economy

The term “customer experience” has become a popular buzzword in the marketing literature (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016, p. 70) and has been described by marketers and academics as a strategic process (Jain, Aagja, & Bagdare, 2017, p. 642). The idea of creating a customer experience is not an entirely new concept because it relies on related research streams. Customer experience management (CEM) as a management discipline has recently received a lot of attention in theory and practice and has become an important marketing concept in the past three decades (Bruhn & Hadwich, 2012, p. 5).

The idea first arose in the mid-1980s (Doppler & Steffen, 2018; Steffen, 2012, p. 2). Hirschman and Holbrook (1982) wrote a paper on hedonic consumption which can be seen as a starting point of this movement (Bruhn & Hadwich, 2012, p. 5). The early concepts of customer experience all focused on the emotional customer gain. Consumers are motivated by the search for emotional arousal when selecting products to consume and seek feelings and fun (Hill & Gardner, 1986).

In the early 1990s when the concept gained popularity, it was a new management discipline (Carbone & Haeckel, 1994). At the end of the 1990s, Pine and Gilmore (1998) had a decisive influence on research with the insight that companies can gain a competitive advantage with their customer experience. A customer experience occurs “when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event” (Pine & Gilmore, 1998, p. 98). In their research they call the newly arising economy an experience economy.

One year later in 1999 Pine and Gilmore published a book titled The Experience Economy which proposes that the way people will consume in the future is changing. The typical differentiation advantages firms used up to then like price and product quality do not suffice anymore (p. 100). According to Pine and Gilmore (1998, p. 98), firms will require to not only create a customer experience but also stage an experience to create a competitive advantage. Product or service propositions are no longer adequate tools for differentiation advantages.

Shaw and Ivens (2002, p. 1) also took up on this idea and even called the customer experience a long-term competitive advantage. They further noted that evoking the right emotions might be one of the key success factors for companies to create customer experiences and 85% of senior business leaders agree that engaging consumers emotionally will increase customer loyalty more than basing the customer experience on physical characteristics (Shaw and Ivens, 2002, p. 62). Holbrook (2000) concluded that companies create customer experiences to educate, entertain, display knowledge, or offer an escape from reality. An analysis of photographic essays reveals that customer value is created by the three “F”s (fantasies, feelings, and fun) (Holbrook, 2006).

The customer experience should be as important as the product or service itself for the creation of a holistic customer experience (Carbone & Haeckel, 1994). Grönroos (2006) pointed out that the consumption experience itself is necessary to create customer value and not individual experience elements. Thus “all elements” such as information, encounters with other people, systems or infrastructure, and physical objects impact the customer’s value creation process (Grönroos, 2006, p. 6). A good starting point for understanding the total customer experience is the assessment of the “clues” a firm is sending to its customers, for example, first concerning product functionality and second concerning the firms sensual environment such as smell and light (Berry, Carbone, & Haeckel, 2002, pp. 85–86).

To be able to create and deliver a unique total customer experience, companies require new competence profiles, for example, and to integrate several business functions such as information technology, logistics, marketing, service operations, human resources, and external partners (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016). This new competence profile is a long-term company goal which can be decided on after an “experience audit” has been undertaken (Berry et al., 2002, p. 86).

A further option of how firms get customers involved in the experience creation process is by letting them personalize or cocreate their products or service offerings. Thus the concept is clearly linked with value creation (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004). Early examples were car manufacturers or sports companies such as Nike or Converse, which let customers cocreate and thus design their own cars or shoes. Today, companies in different industries allow their customers to be part of the customer experience by offering cocreation opportunities on their websites. Mars’ popular M&Ms chocolate lenses can be customized with text and pictures for private occasions or used for business communication or gifts (Mymms, 2019). The popular Nivea Creme produced by Beiersdorf in the traditional blue tin with 75 mL can also be customized in the online shop with text and pictures (Nivea, 2018).

With increasing competitive intensity, the brand experience makes a decisive contribution to differentiation and profiling (Kirchgeorg & Ermer, 2012, p. 253), whereby a differentiation potential to be rated as high presupposes that the perceived experience quality and thus the emotional benefit of the customer experience is high (Jüttner, Schaffner, Windler, & Maklan, 2013). As Smit and Melissen (2018, p. 2) note in their book, “creating a brand experience, also through additional products and services and specific distribution choices, is now part of the game.”

1.2 Definition and delineation of the customer experience from related marketing streams

1.2.1 Definition of the customer experience

Although marketers traditionally see humans as rational decision makers, marketers who believe in the experimental marketing approach see humans as both rational and emotional. They have a pleasurable experience when buying goods or using services (Hwang & Seo, 2016).

Batat (2019, p. 61) explains in his book that the customer experience is a “multidimensional, composite, and an evolving construct” which combines “a harmonious blend of several factors and actors that have a direct or indirect impact on designing successful experiences in connection with the marketplace or not” and has the consumer and the company perspective (p. 61). “Unlike the traditional marketing approach, which focuses on goods (products and services), experiential marketing offers a transformative experience where the consumer engages in a process of self-fulfillment” (p. 61).

By summarizing the term as used in the retail context described by, for example, Carbone and Haeckel (1994), Schmitt (1999), or Verhoef et al. (2009), customer experience can be defined as “the sum total of cognitive, emotional, sensorial, and behavioural responses produced during the entire buying process, involving an integrated series of interaction with people, objects, processes and environment in retailing” (Bagdare & Jain, 2013, p. 791).

The customer experience is generally portrayed as a short-lived personal, subjective experience from the customer side which is typically offered by the service provider. For this book, a holistic view on the customer experience is taken: “Customer experience is the sum of all impressions a customer has with a company over the span of his customer lifetime including individual perceptions, interactions and the quality of the company performance” (freely translated from Bruhn & Hadwich, 2012, p. 10).

The definition already shows that the customer experience has several components or dimensions. Bruhn and Hadwich (2012, p. 5) summarize in their review that research on the customer experience generally follows four research directions: the product experience, the service experience, the brand experience, and the consumption- or shopping experience.

It is suggested in the literature that no matter how ordinary the product or service encounter is, customers will have good, bad, or neutral experience (Carbone & Haeckel, 1994) and that all these experiences allow customers to engage emotionally (Berry & Carbone, 2007). All of these encounters (especially the positive ones) create the perception of value for customers and are determinants of brand or service preference (Berry & Carbone, 2007). The resulting challenge for firms is to engineer their customer experience (Carbone & Haeckel, 1994) so that customers engage positively, perceive value, and build brand preference.

This process is called CEM, which refers to “the process of strategically managing a customer’s entire experience with a product or a company” (Schmitt, 2003, p. 17) along all customer touchpoints (Bruhn & Hadwich, 2012, p. 23).

1.2.2 Relationship to other marketing streams

The customer experience itself is not a new concept because it closely links to research streams within marketing. Among those are “customer satisfaction, service quality, relationship marketing, customer relationship management, customer centricity and customer engagement” (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016, p. 70). In their paper, Lemon and Verhoef (2016) identify seven developments which contributed to customer experience research in the past 60 years: first, customer buying behavior process models (1960s–1970s), second, customer satisfaction and loyalty (1970s), third, service quality research and customer journey mappings (1980s), fourth, relationship marketing in the 1990s, fifth, customer relationship management (CRM) and the elements of customer experience and their outcomes (...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• List of contributors
• Biography
• 1. Introduction to the experience economy
• 2. Introduction to Consumer Food Choices
• 3. The role of food in creating experiences
• 4. Marketers’ unintended consequences of improving the consumer food experience: discovering the key drivers
• 5. Crafting food shopping experiences: the case of food halls in luxury departments stores
• 6. Organic food shopping in Australia and Bangladesh: the role of perceived organic food value in the attitude–intention–behavior model
• 7. Promoting organic products in India: the case of Two Brothers Organic Farms
• 8. Engineering the experience in restaurants by means of process design and management
• 9. Ski huts in Austria and their culinary offer: a question of quality versus quantity?
• 10. Food experience design for plant-based restaurants
• 11. Event catering: enhancing customer satisfaction by creating memorable holistic food experiences
• 12. “We have our style!” Optimizing food experiences in personalized catering boutique concepts
• 13. Curated nostalgia—constructing and consuming the city through a culinary adventure
• 14. Experiences gained through absorption of and immersion in destinations’ food events—case evidence from Finnish travellers
• 15. Creating food experiences: summary and implications for practitioners
• 16. The future of food experiences
• Index