Memorable Customer Experiences – A Research Anthology

Citation

Maman, A. (2011), "Memorable Customer Experiences – A Research Anthology", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 28 No. 3, pp. 241-242. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363761111127680

Reading this book is indeed a memorable reader experience: be ready to get all your senses stimulated! The book presents a well‐thought and organized anthology of papers dealing with memorable consumption experiences. The topic being subjective and highly case‐specific, most of the studies which are presented do rely upon case studies or ethnographic methodologies, which conveys a feeling a vividness and real‐life experiences. Most of the papers are easy to go through, excluding the first chapters of the book, which are more theoretical. They are well‐documented and sometimes thought‐provoking, which is part of their interest. Of course, generalization from the results is difficult to achieve, but reading the whole book really draws a landscape of the importance and complexity of managing customer experiences for marketers.

Basically, the book is divided in six parts, each of them focused on one of the facets of experiential consumption: what the customer experiences concept encompasses (part 1), how it is linked to brands and brand communities (part 2), how customer experiences should be or are actually designed (part 3), case studies about good management of some of them (part 4), two methodological issues related to them (part 5) and lastly some criticisms about them or, more specifically, on the belief that customer experiences need to be provided in all consumption situations and hence be the primary focus for marketers (part 6).

The first part of the book is highly theoretical. Chapter 1 aims at providing a framework to understand what constitutes experiential marketing and customer experiences, using the concepts of resources, transaction and value. The authors argue that experiential marketing is a strategic marketing logic based on the assumption of symbolic resources (which represent perspective and meanings for consumers), engaging transactions (including the congruence between the producer's intentions and consumers' ones), and internalized value (how much the offer is able to convey hedonic responses within consumers). Chapter 2 also presents a conceptual framework for experiential marketing and brand experiences, linked to three types of values for consumers: experience, prestige and function. A distinction is made between experience products, real experience worlds and brand experience worlds.

The second part of the book is composed of three case studies and a chapter (chapter 5) in which the authors do claim that brand communities have an essential role in creating exceptional experiences. Six key success factors for establishing brand communities are proposed, making this chapter highly useful for practitioners. So if you want to learn more about the fans of Morgan cars (chapter 3), the role of brand authenticity to create competitive advantage in Trappist breweries (chapter 4), or how an Australian chain of magazine sellers has achieved translating the experiential concept into small retail spaces (chapter 6), you definitely should read this part of the book. In chapter 3, you will learn that a brand is experienced in two ways, through self‐authentification and authoritative performance, and that some specific tactics can be implemented to build this brand authenticity, ranging from storytelling to becoming part of the cultural landscape. In chapter 4, you will be convinced of the “importance of downplaying commercial consideration to make credible claims of authenticity” (p. 81) and get managerial recommendations to do this. In chapter 6, a real journey through a Mag Nation store, illustrated by photos, will let you understand the “subtle set of contextual rules and guidelines” (p. 116) which can be efficient, keeping in mind that the consumers is empowered with control over the performance and hence the outcome of the experience, simply because a consuming experience is part of his identity‐building process.

The book's third section is highly experiential per se. Chapter 7 is a conceptual chapter in favor of “a balance between the emotional and rational aspects” (p. 122) in any experience. Using the experiential realm model as a basis for reflection, the authors argue that while the emotional parts of an experience can be memorable, this is not the case of its rational parts. However, badly managed rational elements lead to poor or negative pieces of memory related to the experience. They offer a memorable experience model built around four states of minds: delight, dysfunction, directedness, and dissatisfaction. Three rules to achieve the proper balance are offered, turning the chapter in a useful tool for marketers. Chapter 8 and 9 are two examples of memorable consumer experiences: ultra‐fine dining (chapter 8) and hot chocolate consumption in Belgium (chapter 9). They are narratives based on introspective thoughts of the researchers. Although very interesting and actually mouth‐watering, the two chapters need to be read keeping in mind that they are highly culturally‐biased, as the researchers are from an Anglo‐Saxon culture. What seems surprising or unusual to them, was actually more a normal state of consumption for myself, coming from the French‐culture.

The fourth part of the book is composed of three case‐studies which present good and bad features in the management of customer experiences. In chapter 10, you will understand the interaction between value (hedonic and utilitarian) and memory in the retail experience of consumption. If you are a marketer/manager, you should then be focused on the followings: be noticeable, be performant, be exciting, and become valuable. If you achieve all these, customers will just say: “Oh yeah, I remember that store!” Do you want to turn customer experience into a value proposition, to get preference and loyalty? Then build upon the experience of Las Vegas hotels (chapter 11). Remember that engineering the customer experience should be done before, during, and after the experience per se, and that consumers will remember only what they find interesting, personally relevant, unique, and surprising. This chapter will explain how to audit your experiential management in four steps. Chapter 12 deals with a trendy issue: creating a consumer experience in the travel industry, but in a sustainable way. Basically, what the case study tells is that all stakeholders need to be involved, including consumers, who act as co‐creators of a memorable experience. Then they need to be engaged from the first touch point, namely the point of purchase that precedes the experience itself …

The book's fifth part is actually very useful since it questions how to measure the degree of achievement of a memorable experience. Marketers and managers love getting feedback from customers. Relevant and well‐designed measures are thus needed. In chapter 13, the authors do actually investigate whether the self‐reported measures of emotions, immediately after a consumption experience, are able or not to provide enough feedback to marketers. The result is sounding: emotions are idiosyncratic. This means that the variance in the displayed emotions is not at all related to the experience of consumption but to trait differences in temperament among consumers … Chapter 14 explores the causal link between surprise and delight, and it shows that it is not that straight away. The problem actually comes from the scales used to measure satisfaction, which are not adapted …

The last part of the book provides some critiques to the present supremacy acquired by experiential marketing in the business environment. Those two chapters are all the more interesting that their authors are two well‐known researchers in experiential marketing, one of them even being the father of the concept (Holbrook). In chapter 15, Brown states that experiential marketing is nothing new and marketers should be cautious when picking up one of the too many recipes books on the subject. Actually, experiential solutions are much less successful in practice than they are in principle. They should never be considered as “the” best strategic solution. In chapter 16, Holbrook shows how experience has become a real business model, whatever the type of business you are in. He condemns its use in academic institutions, which has led to the “supremacy of the student's consumption experience over the university's intellectual mission”. A school is not a brand …

To wrap up everything said in the previous paragraphs, the book is an interesting review of key issues dealing with a not so new paradigm in the marketplace, namely marketing for “memorable customer experiences”. It should be of interest not only for scholars but also for future marketers and service providers, since it provides many practical managerial implications, guidelines or even tools. For only curious people (and consumers!), it's a good way to feed one's greediness …