The effect of customers' brand experience on brand evangelism: The case of luxury hotels

Summary, in English

Despite growing insight into customers' brand experience, its effect on brand evangelism, or a customer's intense brand support behavior, remains tenuous, exposing an important literature-based gap. Addressing this gap, we adopt a Service-Dominant logic/Consumer Culture Theory perspective to uncover how customers' brand experience dimensions drive their evangelistic behavior for luxury hotels. Addressing these issues, Study 1 analyzes customers' TripAdvisor reviews for six five-star hotels to identify key brand experience themes using content analysis (e.g., human interaction/emotion). Study 2 explores the brand experience/evangelism interface by identifying differences for highly (vs. modestly) evangelistic customers by using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (n = 396 five-star hotel customers). The results reveal human interaction-based hotel attentiveness/caring and emotion-based indulgence as necessary conditions for brand evangelism. Key differences across highly (vs. modestly) evangelistic customers' perceived hotel-based pandemic management and physical environment-based tangible sensorial experience are also identified. We conclude by discussing key implications arising from our analyses.

• Author: Sonal Purohit; Linda Hollebeek; Manish Das; Valdimar Sigurdsson
• Department/s: Marketing
• Publishing year: 2023-03
• Language: English
• Publication/Series: Tourism Management Perspectives
• Volume: 46
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tmp.2023.101092
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Topic: Business Administration
• Keywords: Luxury hotels; Brand experience; Brand evangelism; Fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA); Mixed-methods
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 2211-9736