Special Issue "Customer Experience—through the Lens of Sustainability"

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Geography and Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 January 2022.

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Sang-Eun Byun
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Retailing, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA
Interests: customer experience; CSR communications; experiential retailing; social media strategies
Dr. Manveer Mann
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Marketing, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ 07043, USA
Interests: consumer behavior; retailing; social responsibility; sustainability

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the business landscape (Roggeveen & Sethuraman, 2020). While brands are finding new ways to engage customers virtually, customers are experiencing “virtual fatigue” and crave more relevant and meaningful experiences. Marketers need new directions to drive engaging experiences across the consumer decision journey. Consumers’ rising interest in sustainable brands and demand for corporate sustainability provides an avenue to deliver meaningful customer experience which can ultimately transform customers (Lo, 2020; Smit & Melissen, 2018).

Many researchers have explored customer experience creation and management strategies (Kuehnl, Jozic, & Homburg, 2019; Lemon & Verhoef, 2016). However, few studies have investigated how sustainable initiatives can enhance customer engagement and experience across touchpoints and various stages of the decision journey (Signori, et al., 2019). This Special Issue will contribute to the literature with studies that provide new theoretical and marketing implications in bridging sustainability and customer experience in today’s market environment.

This Special Issue calls for papers which address this area, including but not limited to the following topics:

  • Consumer experience journey: There is a growing body of literature examining the customer journey as framework to understand customer experience (Kuehnl, Jozic, & Homburg, 2019; Lemon & Verhoef, 2016). To fully engage customers, marketers must identify and create key moments to nudge the customer towards purchase and advocacy (Herhausen et al., 2019). However, few researchers have explored how to create key moments to make a journey effective, especially in the context of sustainability. With growing demands for corporate sustainability, it will be important to understand the role of sustainable initiatives in creating meaningful moments throughout the consumer journey.
  • Sustainability and social media: Social media is one of the most integral touchpoints for engaging today’s consumers. It plays a critical role in marketing communications and building customer relationships and loyalty (Bowen, Appiah, & Okafor, 2020). However, there is a need for a deeper understanding of how various industries and companies leverage social media for bridging their sustainability efforts and customer experience and what factors determine different outcomes.
  • The role of offline interactions in sustainable customer experience: As a result of the pandemic, the majority of purchases have shifted from in-person to digital channels, thus changing the role of offline stores or the expected values of in-store experience (Roggeveen & Sethuraman, 2020). Future studies should provide implications on how marketers can leverage offline interactions to create sustainable customer experience.
  • The sharing economy post pandemic: In recent years, the sharing economy, which focuses on the sharing of underutilized assets to promote sustainability and social wellbeing, has gained significant academic attention, especially in various service sectors (Curtis & Mont, 2020; Mi & Coffman, 2019). The sharing economy provides numerous avenues to facilitate sustainable customer experience through collaborative and innovative solutions (Curtis & Lehner, 2019). However, post-pandemic peer-to-peer interactions may pose new challenges in addressing health and safety issues while delivering unique and superior customer experience in a sustainable way. Businesses will need a balanced but novel approach to the sharing economy.
  • Sustainability and emotional connection: Emotions are a critical aspect of customer experience, but how they influence customer experience and consumption outcomes is not entirely understood (Manthiou, Hickman, & Klaus, 2020). It is important to empirically examine how sustainable initiatives can be effectively designed across various touchpoints to induce a positive emotional connection and shape meaningful and sustainable customer experience that ultimately leads to brand loyalty and advocacy.

We welcome conceptual frameworks, empirical studies, case studies, or other research articles that provide unique theoretical and marketing implications for retailing, fashion, hospitality, tourism and related industries. Papers selected for this Special Issue are subject to a rigorous peer review procedure with the aim of rapid and wide dissemination of research results, developments, and applications.

References:

  • Curtis, S. K., & Lehner, M. (2019). Defining the sharing economy for sustainability. Sustainability, 11(3), 567. doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/su11030567
  • Curtis, S. K., & Mont, O. (2020). Sharing economy business models for sustainability. Journal of Cleaner Production, 266. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.121519
  • Herhausen D., Kleinlercher, K., Verhoef, P. C., Emrich, O., & Rudolph T. (2019). Loyalty formation for different customer journey segments. Journal of Retailing, 95(3), 9-29. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2019.05.001
  • Katherine N. Lemon & Peter C. Verhoef (2016). Understanding customer experience throughout the customer journey. Journal of Marketing, 80(6), 69-96. doi: https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.15.0420
  • Kuehnl, C., Jozic, D., & Homburg, C. (2019). Effective customer journey design: Consumers’ conception, measurement, and consequences. Journal of Academy of Marketing Science, 47, 551-568.
  • Lo, A. (2020). Effects of customer experience in engaging in hotels’ CSR activities on brand relationship quality and behavioural intention. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 37(2), 185-199.
  • Manthiou, A., Hickman, E. & Klaus, P. (2020). Beyond good and bad: Challenging the suggested role of emotions in customer experience (CX) research. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 57. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2020.102218
  • Mi, Z., & Coffman, D. (2019). The sharing economy promotes sustainable societies. Nature Communications, 10(1214). doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09260-4
  • Roggeveen, A. & Sethuraman, R. (2020). How the COVID-19 pandemic may change the world of retailing. Journal of Retailing, 96(2), 169-171. doi: 10.1016/j.jretai.2020.04.002
  • Signori, P., Gozzo, I., Flint, D.J., Milfeld, T., & Satinover, N.B. (2019). Sustainable customer experience: Bridging theory and practice. In: Thrassou, A., Vrontis, D., Weber, Y., Shams, S., & Tsoukatos, E. (Eds.), The synergy of business theory and practice, Palgrave studies in cross-disciplinary business research, In association with EuroMed Academy of Business, Palgrave Macmillan: Cham. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17523-8_7
  • Smit, B., & Melissen, F. (2018). Sustainable customer experience design: Co-creating experiences in events, tourism and hospitality. New York: Routledge.

Dr. Sang-Eun Byun
Dr. Manveer Mann
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Sustainability
  • Customer engagement
  • Customer experience
  • Sustainable brands
  • Sustainability communication
  • Corporate sustainability
  • Consumer decision journey
  • Social media strategy
  • Sharing economy post pandemic
  • Emotional connection

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

Article
B Corps’ Social Media Communications during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Through the Lens of the Triple Bottom Line
Sustainability 2021, 13(17), 9634; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13179634 (registering DOI) - 27 Aug 2021
Viewed by 151
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic and rising demand for transparency has heightened the importance of sustainability communications on social media to generate deeper stakeholder engagement. Although B Corporations (B Corps), businesses committed to the triple bottom line (TBL), could serve as a catalyst for sustainable [...] Read more.
The COVID-19 pandemic and rising demand for transparency has heightened the importance of sustainability communications on social media to generate deeper stakeholder engagement. Although B Corporations (B Corps), businesses committed to the triple bottom line (TBL), could serve as a catalyst for sustainable development, little is known about how they communicate on social media during a crisis. Therefore, we examined social media communications of B Corps to (1) identify salient topics and themes, (2) analyze how these themes align with the TBL, and (3) evaluate social media performance against industry benchmarks. We focused on the apparel, footwear, and accessories (AFA) sectors in the U.S. and chose Twitter, a platform known for crisis communication. Using a qualitative method, we found four topics and 21 underlying themes. Topics related to social/environmental issues and COVID-19 were most dominant, followed by product/brand promotions. Further classification of specific themes and cases from a TBL perspective demonstrated that, overall, B Corps in the AFA sectors leveraged various approaches to promote balance between each TBL dimension. Lastly, although collectively B Corps exceeded some of the Twitter industry benchmarks, at an individual level, most brands had room for improvement to build a stronger community and promote synergy among the three pillars of the TBL. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Customer Experience—through the Lens of Sustainability)
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