Nothing beats the real thing: The role of environmental simulation in research on customer retail experiences

Abstract

Up to date, research on customer experiences in retail stores is relatively scarce. When dealing with customer experiences in a retail context, literature typically narrows down to examining the effect of atmospheric cues on customer behavior. To this end, photographs and video are common environmental simulation techniques, whereby authors often refer to the work of Bateson and Hui (1992) which demonstrated the ecological validity of working with environmental simulations under well-formulated circumstances. To gain in-depth insight in the ‘media of representation’ which have been used up till now when studying customer experiences in retail stores, the authors firstly thorough review and complement Turley and Milliman’s (2000) review article on atmospheric research up to date. Secondly, they report on the results of an empirical study whereby 244 respondents were exposed to experiencing a selected retail store via one of four representation modes. Our results indicate that researchers and marketers should be cautious in interpreting and comparing findings blindly across studies based on different environmental representation modes.