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The purpose of this paper is to examine the customer decision-making journey of high involvement female fashion consumers in the context of omnichannel fashion retailing.

The research is qualitative in nature, using a multi-method approach consisting of focus groups, semi-structured interviews, online diaries and follow-up interviews, with grounded theory applied to analyse the data.

The results of the study include a framework to outline the stages of the omnichannel customer decision-making journey for young high involvement female fashion consumers. The findings also reveal that an omnichannel decision-making journey is the one that predicated on risk and that consumers employ specific strategies to avoid such risks.

Due to the nature of this research, the sample size is limited and may not be generalised. Data collection was confined to Manchester, UK.

Customer journey mapping enables practitioners to view the entire shopping experience through the eyes of the customer and enables retailers' fault-find issues within the customer and brand experience.

The paper advances knowledge about fashion and consumer behaviour. The customer decision journey framework maps the emotional experiences, devices and channels encountered by high-involvement fashion consumers across each stage of the omnichannel journey.

This paper aims to define and frame the understanding of customer journeys, associated areas of consumer decision-making process stages and touch point categories based on an ownership perspective.

The research is based on a detailed literature review of customer journeys, in peer-reviewed marketing and retail journals, within the last decade. The Chartered Association of Business Schools (ABS) academic journal guide marketing discipline list was used because it only includes peer-reviewed journals, based on an internationally accepted quality ranked list.

The detailed analysis of the journals identified three groups of touch points (brand owned, partner owned/managed and outside the control of brand owner/partner) and three decision-making process stages (pre-purchase, purchase and post–purchase) that informed a clearer definition and understanding of the customer journey.

Limitations concern the ABS database was used and a ten-year date period was selected, which may exclude some relevant journal articles, particularly those written in a language other than English.

The authors have provided a revised definition of customer journey, clarified the decision-making stages and subsequent categorisation of touch points from an ownership perspective.

The purpose of this study is to explore “how social media influence the way consumers search, evaluate and select a hotel within the ‘evaluation stage’ of the wider hotel decision-making process”.

An exploratory qualitative research has been carried out, conducting 12 individual face-to-face, semi-structured, in-depth interviews with social media users, followed by a qualitative thematic analysis.

Social media transform the consumers’ hotel decision journey by influencing the way consumers search, decide and book hotels. The findings reveal the determinants shaping this process, by shedding light on the perceived value of using social media, consumers’ information search behaviour “then and now”, the advantages and disadvantages of social media use for decision-making, their trustworthiness and the factors that influence the consumers’ hotel decision-journey. The findings are conceptualised in an integrated theoretical model, entitled “hotel consumer decision-journey through social media”.

The study’s scope for qualitative in-depth insights into the “hotel consumer decision-journey through social media” asked for a compromise on a larger sample size and in turn the transferability of the theoretical model beyond service, hospitality and tourism consumer decision-making contexts.

This paper provides strategic implications for hospitality marketing and management for a better understanding of the influence of social media on the hotel customer decision journey. The study shows that a variety of social media with associated content sources and levels add to the complexity of hotel-related information search and decision behaviour. The developed framework not only helps hotel professionals understand consumers’ different levels (e.g. type of content, content source, content level) through which social media might influence decision-making. Various real-life scenarios presented also help practitioners understand the fine nuances of how consumers are influenced by social media and how this causes them to iteratively change their minds and make a final decision towards the rejection or selection of a hotel.

Consumers use social media for a wide spectrum of scenarios in tourism and hospitality, while the influence of social media on the consumers’ hotel decision-making process remains little understood. This study makes a theoretical contribution in that it addresses these existing gaps and bridges consumer behaviour and social media literature in the hotel context to shed light on the “hotel consumer decision journey through social media”. The core contribution is an integrated theoretical model and real-life scenarios that depict the impact of social media on the hotel decision-making.

This chapter focusses on ‘emotions’ as one of the most crucial elements of customer experience. Emotions form the basis of experience as well as the basis for assessing, interpreting, understanding and responding to situations, brands, events and organisations as a customer interacts with the organisation or any of the touchpoints throughout their purchase journey. We discuss the psychological context of emotions, the role emotions play in judgement and decision-making in general and more specifically consumer decision-making. In this chapter, we review the extensive literature and theory in psychology and customer experience to explain how customers perceive bundles of cues, selectively perceive and retain information, and how memories keep reinforcing experiences. We discuss the practical implications for business leaders focussing on understanding customers' emotions and utilising the knowledge to create and capture value through customer experience.

There have been significant developments in the field of retailing with digitalization. One of these developments is the emergence of omnichannel retailing. Although this has affected both firms and consumers considerably, the literature is dominated by the studies dealing with omnichannel retailing from the firms’ perspectives. The studies dealing with omnichannel retailing from the consumers’ perspectives have recently begun to attract the attention of researchers. For this reason, this study conducted a literature review to examine various consumer behaviors mentioned in the studies aimed at explaining consumer behaviors in the omnichannel retailing context. The distribution of these studies according to years and journals, research methods used, theories adopted, and the related five-stage consumer decision-making stages are summarized. Additionally, this review addresses future research avenues.

This study aims to evaluate the role of social media on the hotel decision-making process of consumers during the evaluation stage of searching, identifying the alternatives and selecting a hotel in India. It will help the stakeholders in the hotel industry of India to make the social media platform more efficient for consumers by providing inputs on the factors consumers consider while making online hotel purchase.

This study involves an exploratory qualitative approach which includes 32 face-to-face, semi-structured, in-depth individual interviews with the social media platform users. The selection of interviewees for this study has been done on the basis of a non-random purposive sampling approach.

The findings reveal that social media plays an important role in affecting the way consumers search, decide and book hotels. It also suggests that social media helps consumers in collecting information about products and services, assessing alternatives and making their choices. It confirms that while negative facets exist, the positive benefits outweigh the negative aspects of using social media when selecting a hotel. The results also reveal the impact of circumstantial influence related to social media on hotel selection, on the basis of content source and the level of trust and accuracy in the content.

This study has some strategic implications for hospitality marketing and management related to a better understanding of the influence of social media on the hotel customer decision-making process. The study shows that a variety of social media with associated content sources and levels add to the complexity of hotel-related information search and decision behaviour.

The study makes a contribution by addressing the existing gaps and bridging the arena of consumer behaviour and social media literature in a hotel context and sheds light on how consumer decisions while selecting a hotel are influenced through social media. The core contribution is the generation of factors through in-depth interviews which are based on real-life scenarios relating to the influence of social media on hotel decision-making.

The shopper journey can cross a number of channels leading up to the point of a possible purchase, which may be unseen by the retailer or brand for the targeted purchase. The purpose of this paper is to gain a greater understanding of the decision making and purchase intention activity for online Millennial shoppers in deciding what fashion garments to buy in the digital retail environment. The paper also investigates the use of technology and social media involvement in the shopper journey leading up to the point of purchase.

In line with other studies that investigated online shopper behaviour (Balabanis and Reynolds, 2001; Pavlou et al., 2007), the authors have undertaken an exploratory investigation using an online survey conducted with respondents sourced through using Survey Monkey Audience. The survey was conducted with over 580 respondents (49.7 per cent female and 50.3 per cent male) between 16 and 34 years old living in England.

The findings highlight a picture of shoppers going on very different shopper journeys with different lengths, influenced by different touch points and using different media and devices. Each customer has their own individual experience and expectation. They can move through extremely diverse, long and complicated journeys in the buying process before they purchase a product. Most striking is their willingness to reach out and be influenced by other people beyond the control of any retailer – using platforms that are not necessarily specifically related with any retailer. Shoppers can undertake numerous activities before they make their final purchase decision, seeking content from different retailers, asking for social validation of their decision from their social networks both online and offline which is often out of sight of the retailer or brand.

The findings show how retailers and brands can understand the shopper decision journey and their behaviours across all the devices and channels that are used. Moreover, for some or part of the digital journey the shopper can often be unseen by the retailer or brand.

Consumers actively seek out novelty, knowledge and inspiration but shoppers employ a variety of interactions over a much greater period of time to arrive at the moment of purchase. This research provides an insight into the range of complex views and positions held by each individual to get a much more complete picture of where shoppers are looking to buy and what are their interests.

Understanding the customer has been the focus of attention of businesses and academia for many decades. Starting in 1960s, complex buyer behavior models developed by Nicosia, by Howard and Sheth (1969), were followed by Engel, Blackwell and Miniard in 1978 (Engel, Blackwell, & Miniard, 1990) to understand the buying process, shaping the thoughts today about consumers’ experiences in an omnichannel world. Interest in customer perceptions and expectations (Parasuraman, Berry, & Zeithaml, 1991), SERVQUAL (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Leonard, 1985) and SERVPERV (Cronin & Taylor, 1994) moved the academia to discuss the relationship marketing (Morgan & Hunt, 1994; Parvatiyar & Sheth, 1999; Peterson, 1995; Sheth & Parvatiyar, 1995). Wilson’s model (1995) of buyer–seller relationships extended the former models with additional concepts like social bonds, comparison level of alternatives, power roles, technology, structural bonds and cooperation as influencers on relationship development stages. His emphasis reflects a high relevancy in the omnichannel world of customers’ interactions today. Winer (2001), a pioneer to discuss the customer relationship management focused on a database to know about customers’ purchase history and interests. The millennium look at customer lifetime value is again relationship focused. For Fader, Hardie, and Lee (2005) rather the long-term focus of the consumer value and actions are important to understand the loyalty and nonlinear nature of relations. While Reinartz and Kumar (2003) focused on profitable customer lifetime and customer heterogeneity, Verhoef (2003) analyzed the impact of customers’ relationship perceptions and relationship marketing instruments on both customer retention and customer share development. The customer-centric thinking was first discussed by Grönroos (2006) within a new definition of marketing. The service dominant logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2008) resulted in the next highlight, the co-creation of value with customer involvement and customer advisory (Güngör, 2012; Güngör & Bilgin, 2011; Messner, 2007) empowering the customers and giving them the control over the supplier networks. Different factors will be influential at different stages of the buying process of customer clusters. The Web- and non-Web-based customer-centric measures can be multifold. Andersson, Movin, Mähring, Teigland, and Wennberg (2018) and Bank (2018) emphasize the importance of technology readiness focus throughout the customer–supplier journey. The question to be answered is, to which extent the empowered customers and the suppliers of this age are ready to adopt, embrace and finally use new technologies in the omnichannel world of holistic interactions that form new visions, expectations, values and desires in a tremendous speed. Ideas and experiences are shared and exchanged in online communities without the need of the involvement of the suppliers. This “holistic view” challenges firms further through the seamlessness it requires to create unity. Customer-centric research needs a new push for the development of instruments and measures to cope with the consumer decision process challenges. Process thinking is needed to capture the purchasing habits in an omnichannel world and to build a new thought for customer journey experience with the aim to understand technology-linked value propositions of customer clusters to optimize channel interactions. Customer journeys have to focus and describe the online/offline experiences at the hybrid shopping mile, trace the behavioral influential factors of the customers’ and sellers’ world in a technological environment. This chapter will discuss “Technology based Orbit Interactions” for “The Hybrid Shopping Mile and its Customer Journey Mapping” with a “Customer Intelligence Framework.” The outcome of the hybrid customer journey mapping gives orientation for customer-management decisions in developing new approaches.

To achieve a full understanding of the role of marketing from plan to profit requires a knowledge of the basic building blocks. This textbook introduces the key concepts in the art or science of marketing to practising managers. Understanding your customers and consumers, the 4 Ps (Product, Place, Price and Promotion) provides the basic tools for effective marketing. Deploying your resources and informing your managerial decision making is dealt with in Unit VII introducing marketing intelligence, competition, budgeting and organisational issues. The logical conclusion of this effort is achieving sales and the particular techniques involved are explored in the final section.