Building customer experience strategy in phygital retail: an analysis within the fashion industry

Frame of the research. Given the rising importance of customer experience and accelerating digitization, brands must meet customers wherever they prefer, urging brands to build a symbiotic ecosystem of digital and physical retail touchpoints through phygital strategies. Purpose of the paper. The paper analyzes the role of customer experience in phygital retail strategies. Using the fashion industry as an empirical setting, it adopts qualitative research to investigate how customer experience can be successfully delivered in phygital retail. Methodology. By analyzing existing literature on customer experience and retail, we extract five key elements to deliver relevant customer experience within phygital retail which are then validated through qualitative research combining a press and media case analysis and semi-structured interviews. Managerial implications are stressed. Results. The research identifies five key elements as those successfully creating a relevant customer experience in phygital retail: shared purpose, experience personalization, core digital platform, relevant positioning, and ecosystem of partnerships. If effectively integrated, they can guide organizational decision-making and strategy. Research limitations. Main limitations relate to the impossibility to visit stores and the running of interviews online with partial control on contextual variables. Multiple sources were combined to make findings reliable, and a sample of questions was given before interviews to reduce uncontrollability. Sample size could also be further enlarged. Managerial implications. Due to escalating digitization, brands become increasingly omnipresent in consumers’ daily life. As this asks them to develop phygital retail strategies, this research supports managers on how they can develop a coherent customer experience throughout phygital retail touchpoints integrating the proposed five elements. Originality of the paper. Despite growing literature on phygital customer experience and retail, it provides limited guidance for managers on how to build an effective customer experience strategy, especially in phygital retail. This paper makes a theoretical and practical contribution, showing the relevance of five elements.