Customer Experience Management in Retailing: Understanding the Buying Process

Retailers recognize that greater understanding of customers can enhance customer satisfaction and retail performance. This article seeks to enrich this understanding by providing an overview of existing consumer behavior literature and suggesting that specific elements of consumer behavior—goals, schema, information processing, memory, involvement, attitudes, affective processing, atmospherics, and consumer attributions and choices—play important roles during various stages of the consumer decision process. The authors suggest ways in which retailers can leverage this understanding of consumer behavior. Each of these conceptual areas also offers avenues for further research.