Building of consumer-brand relationships for the customer experience management

The aim of this paper is to analyze the customer experience in the consumer-brand relationships. Customer experience is considered as the set of all moments of interaction between an organization and a customer, in which physical, functional and emotional factors stimulate the senses of customers. Examining the consumer-brand relationships of young consumers about four selected product categories-brands, in this work we study empirically these interactions - through qualitative methodologies - at two levels: a. at product category level, analyzing the customer experience’ s factors (firm’s experiential platform) that sustain the value co-creation process between firm and customer; b. at brand level, analyzing some key determinants of consumer-brand relationships, such as the free associations, the brand metaphors, and the brand experience. The paper is organized in three main parts: in the first, there is a literature review on the role of customer experience management in the marketing strategies and on the concept of consumer-brand relationships, focalizing the attention on its determinants; in the second are proposed the findings of the empirical research on the customer experience in consumer-brand relationships about the four selected product categories-brands; in the third, we discuss the findings in terms of managerial implications, limits and future research opportunities.