The Impact Of Customer Experience On Service Brand Equity

In nowaday society, a deep reform is taking place. Social economy type is going from commodity economy,service economy to experience economy age.Different from the former ages, experience economy age pays more attention to people's individual demands.With the improvement of people's living standard and quality,people's consumption concept is not that people only purchase more commodity, but that people gain more individual content through consumption.In the period that market competition tends to be the same,almost all companies try to seek a new path of branding. Due to service uncertainty from its intangibility, it is vital for service companies to build service brands. From the traditional viewpoint, a brand is a name, term, sign, symbol or any other feature that identifies one company's product or service as distinct from those of other companies.There are two deficiencies in the definition: the first one is neglecting the characteristic that service is a process, the second one is that customers are rejected (Gronroos,2000).At present, many service companies build service brands under the traditional viewpoint,but only a few succeed in the end.The main reason is that a service brand is not only an identity, but also a most basic experience "provider". Service consumption is process consumption,customer experience is the core for sevice companies to build sevice brands.For a service company, it is a smart choice to build a distinguished service brand by letting a customer get an unforgettable experience(and subsequently improving a brand image).In the course of literature review and theoretical research,this paper is around the two key concepts of customer experience and service brand equity.It successively reviews the literature of (customer) experience, (service) brand equity, and the impact of customer experience on service brand equity.Based on literature review, the author defines and analyzes customer experience and its characteristics, (customer-based) service brand equity and its key factors (dimensions) in view of the customer.Of course, customer experiential process is also influenced by a series of factors. In different markets, these influencing factors are different on form and involve many aspects on content.In terms of this situation, this paper selects department store as the typical survey market.Based on related literature and qualitative research, this paper commences with the influencing factors of department stores' customer (shopping) experience, and explores the main dimensional factors which influence customer experience.In addition, it proposes a conceptual model of the whole research on the basis of related literature about influencing relationships between customer experiential influencing factors,customer experience, service brand equity and its dimensions. Taking the conceptual model of the whole research as the research framework, this paper mainly solves the two concrete questions: the first question is customer experiential influencing factors and their action mechanism (study 1), the second question is the impact of customer experience on service brand equity (study 2).The two studies both use the empirical research method.Study 1 or study 2 each includes an exploratory stud.y and a formal study.The survey questionaires of study 2 are collected together with study 1.At the beginning, the author has done a sample survey of the exploratory study in four department stores of a business district in Dalian. 381 paper questionaires have been handed out randomly, and 344 effective questionaires have been received finally. The purpose of the exploratory study is to clear the relationships between the variables in the research model of customer experiential influencing factors and their action mechanism, or the impact of customer experience on service brand equity, test reliability and validity of measure tools, explore other hypotheses which should be tested in the formal study,and modify the research model each.In the formal study, the author has also done a sample survey of the formal study in nine department stores of two business districts in Dalian.742 paper questionaires have been distributed randomly, and 680 effective questionaires have been gotten in the end.According to the results of hypotheses' test, this paper tests and revises the modified research hypotheses and model in study 1 or study 2.In addition, this paper also analyzes the effect of demographic variables on customer experience, service brand equity and its dimensions based on the data from the formal study.This paper utilizes statistics softwares of SPSS 11.5 and LISREL 8.51 to analyze data in study 1 or study 2.Through the above empirical research, this paper arrives at some main conclusions. Compared with former researches, the innovation of this paper mainly includes three aspects:(1) This paper tests and gets the final model of customer experiential influencing factors and their action mechanism.This paper does a deep exploration on the influencing factors of department stores' customer experience from the customer's ingle, constructs the research model of customer experiential influencing factors and their action mechanism. According to the results of study 1, this paper modifies the primary research model, tests and gets the final model of customer experiential influencing factors and their action mechanism. Study 1 finds that customer dimension, contextual dimension, traffic dimension are three main dimensions in customer experiential influencing dimensions (company-predominated contextual dimension is the most important one).Study 1 also finds that service functional quality is the most important influencing factor of customer experience among three dimensions' factors.(2) This paper tests and gets the final model of the impact of customer experience on service brand equity. Based on existing literature, this paper takes department store into consideration and tries to discuss the impact of customer experience on service brand equity, constructs the research model of the impact of customer experience on service brand equity.According to the results of study 2, this paper modifies the primary research model, tests and gets the final model of the impact of customer experience on service brand equity. The final model wholly shows the influencing mechanism of customer experience on service brand equity. Study 2 makes up deficiencies that former researches focus on the product brand solely, validates that customer experience is very important for service companies to build service brands.(3) This paper develops a measurement scale of customer experiential influencing factors in the department stores, pushes forward empirical researches of service branding based on customer experience.On the basis of the foreign literature and qualitative research, this paper constructs a primary measurement scale,refines the scale according to pre-survey's data.Through principal components factor analysis and reliability analysis of the exploratory study, reliability analysis and confirmatory factor analysis of the formal study,this paper tests validity and reliability of the scale, and gains the scale of customer experiential influencing factors in the end. The two related empirical studies based on customer experience ( Study 1 and study 2 ) systematically analyze and validate the causal relationship chains of customer experiential influencing factors (especially, company- predominated contextual dimension's factors)→customcr experience→brand image/relationship and so on→service brand equity, show the intrinsic logic of service branding based on customer experience, and make the contribution to related empirical researches.