However, the analysis of online customer experience should integrate both traditional customer experience theory and flow-related theories to build up a better understanding of online customer experience.
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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Previous Studies on Online Customer Experience
2.1.1 Previous Studies on Online Customer Experience Abroad
Early in 1982, the concept of customer experience was firstly introduced (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982) and not until the 1990s customer experience were frequently discussed in many marketing-related papers, because the experience economy has become a follow-up stage of commodities economy, goods economy and services economy (Pine and Gilmore, 1999). In experience economy, companies should try every effort to create memorable and distinct experience for customers as added value of products and services (LaSalle and Britton, 2003; Caru and Cova, 2003; Caru and Cova, 2007). So from then on, researches focusing on customer experience emerged and subsequently various perspectives of customer experience appeared (Gentile et al, 2007).
So far there are no systematic definitions of experience marketing, and there is a wide range of understandings of customer experience in available papers. Most researchers acknowledged that customer experience is an affective, emotional, subjective, personal and memorable event which can affect customers’ response to the encounter with the companies at different levels (Brakus, 2001; Kim and Choi, 2013; Pine and Gilmore, 1999; Pitkanen and Tuohino, 2006; Tarssanen and Kylanen, 2007; Schmitt, 1999). Therefore, a product or service should have both functional and Kansei (a word representing feeling, taste and emotion, etc.) elements, which interact complementarily for adding value and customer experience serving (Amasaka and Nagasawa, 2000; Nagasawa, 2008). Similarly, some researchers contended that both the utilitarian and hedonic value of a product or service should be conveyed during the shopping process for the purpose of re-patronage by customers (Babin, Darden and Griffin, 1994; Babin and Darden, 1995; Jones, Reynolds and Arnold, 2006; Sheth, 1983). Later on, the multidimensionality of customer experience was recognised by psychologist, behaviorist and later marketing researchers.
