The role of customer experience in building brand loyalty within the service context

Abstract

Customer experience theory, research, and practice represent an evolving area of study within the marketing discipline. Despite its importance, the customer experience concept remains vague and lacks a thorough theoretical foundation. This study addresses this gap in the literature and examines the antecedents and consequences of customer experience from customer perspectives. The study provides a conceptual framework building from a qualitative study and the existing literature. This article includes a formal test of the framework using a large-scale survey of British customers to examine their experience with resort-hotel brands. The results show price perception, core services, and word-of-mouth have a direct impact on how customers interpret their experiences with resort-hotel brands; perceived service quality plays a mediatory role in the relationship between servicescape, core service, and customer experience. Measuring validation strength of customer experience upon brand loyalty by best fit in combination with cross-sample predictive validity models is a valuable contribution of this study.