Tell me a story about yourself: The words of shopping experience and self-satisfaction
This research addresses how shopping experiences influence customer self-satisfaction, with incremental insights for retail environments.
The study analyzed customer interviews to explore how shopping experiences are verbally expressed and linked to emotions, satisfaction, and self-identity, finding that emotions play a key role in pre-purchase discourse and connect inwardly to the self.
In this paper we investigate the verbal expression of shopping experience obtained by a sample of customers asked to freely verbalize how they felt when entering a store. Using novel tools of Text Mining and Social Network Analysis, we analyzed the interviews to understand the connection between the emotions aroused during the shopping experience, satisfaction and the way participants link these concepts to self-satisfaction and self-identity. The results show a prominent role of emotions in the discourse about the shopping experience before purchasing and an inward-looking connection to the self. Our results also suggest that modern retail environment should enhance the hedonic shopping experience in terms of fun, fantasy, moods, and emotions.