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This paper aims to empirically investigate the typologies of phygital (synaeresis of “physical” and “digital”) customer experiences (CXs) that can arise in high-tech retail based on the intensity of consumers' responses and reactions to the stimuli triggered by firms. Moreover, it explores how firms attempt to shape the architecture of the phygital CXs. Notably, this article identifies the flexible and agile strategies implemented by firms to enhance the several typologies of phygital CXs, with the intention of better exploiting physical and digital features to respond to the differences in customers' needs, preferences and expectations.

This study performs an in-depth exploratory single-case study based on semi-structured interviews with the customers, managers and employees of the Webidoo Store.

This study develops a framework illustrating the main typologies of ordinary (“hostile”, “controversial” and “disappointing”) and extraordinary (“passionate” and “explorative”) CXs that can arise in phygital contexts. Also, it identifies some key flexible and agile strategies (“decompressive strategy”, “mentoring strategy”, “prompting strategy” and “entertaining strategy”) that companies might follow to adjust their offerings and respond quickly to the different forms of phygital CXs to create a more compelling experience tailored to customers' needs, preferences and expectations.

Among the study's limitations are the single-case study methodology and a specific setting like the Italian one. As a result, future studies could broaden the study to include other research contexts and countries. The paper offers significant managerial insights based on the many forms of CX across ordinary and extraordinary CXs. Thus, it provides critical takeaways for businesses to meet customer demand.

This paper analyzes the different typologies of ordinary and extraordinary CXs that could occur in phygital contexts based on the intensity of consumers' responses and reactions to firms' stimuli. Also, it explores how firms attempt to shape the architecture of the phygital CXs through flexible and agile strategies. From this paper, managers and decision-makers can reflect on successful strategies they could use to affect the stimuli to which customers respond in an agile manner, thus enhancing phygital CXs.

Accommodations providers in the sharing economy are increasingly competing with the hotel industry vis-à-vis the guest experience. Additionally, experience-related research remains underrepresented in the hospitality and tourism literature. This paper aims to develop and test a model of experiential consumption to provide a better understanding of an emerging phenomenon in the hospitality industry. In so doing, the authors also expand Pine and Gilmore’s original experience economy construct.

Using data from a survey of 630 customers who stayed at a hotel or an Airbnb in the previous three months, the authors performed a multi-step analysis procedure centered on structural equation modeling to validate the model.

The authors demonstrate that the dimensions of serendipity, localness, communitas and personalization represent valuable additions to Pine and Gilmore’s original experience economy construct. Airbnb appears to outperform the hotel industry in the provision of all experience dimensions. The authors further define the pathways that underlie the creation of extraordinary, memorable experiences, which subsequently elicit favorable behavioral intentions.

The findings suggest the need for the hotel industry to adopt a content marketing paradigm that leverages various dimensions of the experience economy to provide customers with valuable and relevant experiences. The industry must also pay greater attention to its use of branding, signage and promotional messaging to encourage customers to interpret their experiences through the lens of these dimensions.

The study expands a seminal construct from the field of services marketing in the context of the accommodations industry. The Accommodations Experiencescape is offered as a tool for strategic experience design. The study also offers a model of experiential consumption that explains customers’ experiences with accommodations providers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between mental simulation and affective misforecasting of hedonic consumption experiences.

The authors present a series of lab and field studies that manipulate mental simulation and experience type (ordinary versus extraordinary) and measure affective misforecasting and mindfulness. Data were analyzed using a combination of ANOVA and PROCESS.

Mental simulation before an experience causes negative affective misforecasting to occur for extraordinary experiences but not ordinary experiences. The authors further show that mindfulness mediates the effect of mental simulation on affective misforecasting.

The findings provide insight into how thinking about experiences before consumption affects consumers’ actual engagement with the experience. This paper suggests that, by encouraging consumers to mentally simulate their experiences before consumption, marketers may cause consumers to miss out on enjoying their experiences to the fullest. Instead, marketers may want to maintain some mystique by encouraging consumers to “come see for themselves”.

The authors demonstrate a novel cause of affective misforecasting: mental simulation before the experience and provide initial evidence in support of a novel psychological process explanation (i.e. mindfulness) for the effect of mental simulation on affective misforecasting.

This study aims to propose a framework for understanding the construction of extraordinary consumer experiences in events from a multidimensional and longitudinal value perspective.

The main research site was the Rock in Rio Brazil VI festival, an extraordinary consumption experience. The study takes a phenomenological interpretative approach, for which input was obtained using multiple data collection techniques (in-depth interviews, diaries and photographs) in a longitudinal study that took place over 18 months. The study also includes the first author’s observations and interactions with the event organizer and its partners during the same period, and post-pandemic complementary data that were collected in 2021.

The research findings demonstrate the integrative potential of concepts and theories that are analysed in the light of a longitudinal perspective for understanding value formation for consumers in their experience of extraordinary events. It also indicates that the construction of experience involves a high level of interaction and a high degree of engagement with the consumer in order to foster the development of an affective relationship between the service provider and the user that is based on a co-created experience.

The study answers call for more research into understanding consumer value, and how it is created, delivered and developed over time (Helkkula et al., 2012). It also expands our understanding of consumption experiences and the consumer journey (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016). It encourages longitudinal qualitative studies to be carried out and analyses value in the consumption experience in the field of events.

This chapter compares two protected natural parks as specific experiential contexts providing two different experiences for visitors: extraordinary and memorable versus ordinary and mundane (Carù & Cova, 2006, 2007). Each experiential context enables the distinction of actual visitors’ experiences (Pine & Gilmore, 1999) inside each park. A qualitative study collected information to differentiate each protected natural park based on three dimensions: the geophysical environment, the recreational practices, and product and service offer management. A quantitative study analyzed the effect of a specific experiential context through a comparison of actual visitors’ experiences on four dimensions (esthetics, escapism, education, and entertainment) in both countries (500 in each country). Results of the qualitative study show that the Taiwanese park provides an experiential context with more extraordinary and memorable experiences while the French park provides an experiential context with more ordinary and mundane experiences. The results of the quantitative study show the distinction of actual visitors’ experiences inside each park: more immersion through esthetics and escapism in Taiwan and more absorption through education and entertainment in France. Each park manager has to build one’s own positioning and should offer a unique experiential context based on the three dimensions to provide more extraordinary and memorable or more ordinary and mundane experiences. this study highlights the interest of an analysis framework of experiences adapted from Carù and Cova (2006, 2007) and Pine and Gilmore (1999) underlining the link between experiential context and actual experiences.

Purpose – This chapter provides a critical review of the emerging field of consumer experience and experiential marketing.Design/methodology/approach – We review definitions, perspectives, and key research areas on the topics of consumer experience, product and service experiences, off-line and online experiences, as well as consumption and brand experiences. We report empirical findings, seminal studies, and insight into the experience process (e.g., how consumers process experiential attributes, how they process experiences over time, and whether positive and negative experiences can co-occur). We present research on experiential dimensions, experiential themes, and the nature of extraordinary experiences.Value/originality – The chapter provides value by discussing the key measurement and marketing management issues of experiential marketing and discusses the original issue whether it is rational for consumers to include experiences in their decision making.

This paper aims to investigate how the physical and sensory environmental triggers interact with subjective consumer evaluations in the production of shopping experiences, an under-investigated theme, despite its relevance.

An interpretative multi-method approach was used by combining video observation with camera eyeglasses and in-depth interviews with 30 customers of a department store.

Results offer a holistic framework with four-dimensional axial combination involving physical comfort, psychological comfort, physical product evaluation and sensorial product evaluation. Based on this framework, results highlight the role of comfort and products in producing shopping experience in ordinary store visits.

The findings contribute both to consumer experience studies and to the retail marketing literature in shading a light on experience production in ordinary store visits. Specifically, we detail these visits not as a static response to a given environment stimulus, but as a simultaneous objective and subjective combination able to produce experience.

The results encourage managers to understand the experience production not just as an outcome of managerially influenced elements, like décor or odor. It involves considering subjective elements in the design of consumers’ physical and sensorial retail experiences.

Adopting an innovative method of empirical data collection, results generated a framework that integrates the objective shopping environment and subjective consumer responses. This research considers the role of comfort and product features and quality both physically and sensorially to develop experiences in a holistic manner in ordinary shopping visits.

This study aims to examine the co-creation of customer experiences at different levels in service ecosystems, analyzing the case of a tourist destination.

A questionnaire was designed based on previously validated scales. The questionnaire was distributed through the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram. The survey yielded 1,476 valid responses for three types of destinations. Structural equation modeling and multigroup analysis were performed to test the hypotheses.

Aggregate service experience and memorable customer experience (MCE) in service ecosystems are determined by customer experiences at a dyadic level. Service experience at the ecosystem level is formed from ordinary experiences at the actor level, while MCE is formed from extraordinary experiences at the dyadic level. The type of ecosystem moderates the relationships between the variables but does not alter the importance of each of them.

The relationship between the co-creation of customer experiences at different levels of service ecosystems (dyadic vs aggregate) is addressed. A relationship is established between the ordinary and extraordinary character of experiences and their memorability at the ecosystem level.

The purpose of this study is to capture the strength of consumer’s perceived brand sacredness. The authors developed and validated a measurement scale composed of three related dimensions: supremacy, mesmerization and communitas.

Six empirical studies were conducted to identify the brand sacredness construct domains, develop and validate the measurement and test the nomological network between brand sacredness and it antecedent and outcome variables.

Results from a series of studies provided robust supports for the scale structure and demarcated the construct domains from other consumer–brand relationship measures. Testing of nomological validity of the scale further showed that brand sacredness is influenced by brand love, emotional brand attachment and brand loyalty and, meanwhile, provides explanatory power to predict theoretically related outcome variables, including transcendent consumer experience, defense of brand, incorporation brand in extended-self, brand ritualism and brand evangelism.

This study is based on cross-sectional survey data obtained from respondents belonging to well-established brand communities. A longitudinal study involving recent and emerging brand communities could provide an enhanced understanding of the evolution of brand sacredness with time, including brand sacralizaton process as well as possible de-sacralization process.

The study provides significant insights for brand managers to create an enduring brand and ascertain that consumers find their affiliations with the brand and make it the sacred core of their lives by fandom management through brand evangelism.

This study adds to the theory on consumer–brand relationship realm by delineating the domains of brand sacredness with its defining feature of extraordinary experience transcending an ordinary brand. It contributes to the existing body of branding and customer-based brand equity literature by incorporating the spiritual aspects of faith, passion and devotion into measuring the value of a brand.

Using techniques developed mainly in subjective well-being and “happiness” studies, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the applicability of these and related methods for understanding and evaluating the emotional responses experienced within the live music event environment.

The concept of “experience” is debated and set within the context of music events designed to create a specific type of emotional experience for the attendees. The main tools for researching experiences over a time period are considered focusing on the “experience sampling method” (ESM) (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997) and the “day reconstruction method” (Kahneman et al., 2004). These methods are critiqued in terms of their usefulness and practicality as research tools in the study of audience emotions.

A revised method was then developed and a small-scale trial undertaken at a live music event, the results of which are presented and discussed. A conceptual model illustrating the interconnectedness of experience is introduced as an example of the application of the data gathered through this method to theory development. The paper concludes by reflecting on both the methodological appropriateness and practicality of ESMs as a way of gathering valuable data on the emotions engendered by events.

An obstacle yet to be overcome is using this data to predict attitudinal and behavioural change related to arts marketing goals. However, studies in other areas have clearly shown that emotional response is a significant indicator of future behaviour suggesting that the potential is there.

The trialled method provides a useful starting point for better understanding the complexity of emotional effects triggered at live music events.

The paper concludes that an adaptation of these methods has the potential to provide much needed rich and credible data on the feelings and emotional reactions triggered by different elements of a live event.