Conceptualizing and measuring experience quality: the customer`s perspective

Abstract

Today many customers, managers, and scholars have become aware of the importance of experiences, which are characterized as satisfying customers` psychic or personal needs. For customers, they care more about the experiences that are provided by stores, and they are willing to pay for them. As for managers, attractive experiences are the products they have taken great efforts to create, manage, and sell. For academic researchers, experiences are considered as distinct economic offerings that are different from goods and services. These scholars believe that the focus of the economy has been transferred to experience (O`Sullivan, E.L., & Spangler, K.J. (1998). Experience marketing: Strategies for the new millennium. State College, PA: Venture Publishing), and that experience industries are on the rise (O`Sullivan, E.L., & Spangler, K.J. (1998). Experience marketing: Strategies for the new millennium. State College, PA: Venture Publishing; Pine, B.J., & Gilmore, J.H. (1998). Welcome to the experience economy. Harvard Business Review (July–August), 97–105; Pine, B.J., & Gilmore, J.H. (1999). The experience economy: Work is theatre & every business a stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press; Schmitt, B.H. (1999). Experiential marketing: How to get customer to sense, feel, think, act, relate to your company and brands. New York: The Free Press). Although experiences have moved to the centre of customers` consumption activities and have become crucial for business success, very few studies have investigated the customers` perceptions of experience quality. In this research, we have conceptually defined experience quality as the customers` emotional judgment about an entire experience with an elaborately designed service setting. We have undertaken multiple phases in conceptualizing and measuring the concept of experience quality.