Brand and customer experience in service organizations : literature review and brand experience construct validation

Abstract

Commoditization of goods and services has generated a need for providing customer value beyond functional attributes and benefits. The concepts of brand and customer experience have therefore gained increased interest among marketing scholars and practitioners. The experience literature is primarily descriptive and managerially oriented, for the most part ignoring the conceptual nature of experience, its underlying dimensions, and its relationship with other key brand concepts. Following a literature review of how brand and customer experience have been conceptualized and empirically studied, this paper presents a study with the purpose of testing a recently published brand experience scale. In addition to validating the established dimensions of the measurement scale, the study tests an additional dimension; relational experience, which is proposed as particularly relevant for service brands. The study also reports results of a test of the relationship between experience and other brand-related scales.