Although research continues to debate the future of the marketing concept, practitioners have taken the lead, appraising customer experience management (CEM) as one of the most promising marketing approaches in consumer industries. In research, however, the notion of CEM is not well understood, is fragmented across a variety of contexts, and is insufficiently demarcated from other marketing management concepts. By integrating field-based insights of 52 managers engaging in CEM with supplementary literature, this study provides an empirically and theoretically solid conceptualization. Specifically, it introduces CEM as a higher-order resource of cultural mindsets toward customer experiences (CEs), strategic directions for designing CEs, and firm capabilities for continually renewing CEs, with the goals of achieving and sustaining long-term customer loyalty. We disclose a typology of four distinct CEM patterns, with firm size and exchange continuity delineating the pertinent contingency factors of this generalized understanding. Finally, we discuss the findings in relation to recent theoretical research, proposing that CEM can comprehensively systemize and serve the implementation of an evolving marketing concept.

Recently, practitioners have begun appraising an effective customer journey design (CJD) as an important source of customer value in increasingly complex and digitalized consumer markets. Research, however, has neither investigated what constitutes the effectiveness of CJD from a consumer perspective nor empirically tested how it affects important variables of consumer behavior. The authors define an effective CJD as the extent to which consumers perceive multiple brand-owned touchpoints as designed in a thematically cohesive, consistent, and context-sensitive way. Analyzing consumer data from studies in two countries (4814 consumers in total), they provide evidence of the positive influence of an effective CJD on customer loyalty through brand attitude-over and above the effects of brand experience. Importantly, an effective CJD more strongly influences utilitarian brand attitudes, while brand experience more strongly affects hedonic brand attitudes. These underlying mechanisms are also prevalent when testing for the contingency factors services versus goods, perceived switching costs, and brand involvement.Keywords Effective customer journey design . Touchpoints . Customer journey . Brand experience . Scale development Apple, Amazon.com, BMW, IKEA, and Nespresso are prominent examples of brands that are dedicated to an effective customer journey design (CJD) by carefully applying design principles to all touchpoints they offer consumers during their customer journeys (Maechler et al. 2016). Amazon, for example, has recently added a new touchpoint to its customers' purchase journeys by ordering 20,000 vans. Cohesive to Amazon's value proposition of offering a convenient online shopping experience, the firm is working to build its own delivery fleet in the United States to gain more control over how its packages are delivered to customers. Consistent with other Amazon touchpoints, the vans are stamped with Amazon's smile logo, allowing for easy recognition. Importantly, taking into account consumers' specific needs and contexts, this new touchpoint allows shoppers to better track their packages or to see a photo of where a package was left if they were not at home (Pisani 2018).As the Amazon example illustrates, the proliferation of touchpoints in today's digitally enriched markets makes managing the customer experience increasingly complex (Lemon and Verhoef 2016) and, if not adequately managed, could Bcontribute negatively to the brand relationship^ (Duncan and Moriarty 2006, p. 238). Therefore, many practitioners have worked to manage and design touchpoints throughout customer journeys as best possible. For example, firms such as Accenture, IBM, and McKinsey invest heavily in capabilities that combine design thinking, marketing, and data analytics to plan entire customer journeys (The Economist 2015). Echoing this trend, researchers have pinpointed customer journeys as a new source of customer value in the twenty-first century Rebecca Hamilton served as Special Issue Guest Editor for this article.

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