Features of Consumer Experience Formation: Case of the Sports Apparel and Footwear Market

Ads, brands’ social media, friends’ recommendations about the product – all is a part of unique customer experience. The relevance of this research is connected with a fact that customer experience started to grow a long time before potential client comes to the shop and opens company’s website. In the framework of master thesis customer experience will be researched in terms of offline environment. Based on academic literature, there are several key components of retail customer experience formation: brand price, brand quality, service people in the store, store location and retail atmosphere. As a result, which combines all the variables of retail customer experience, we decided to choose an ultimate variable – «retail customer choice», customer’s decision of making a purchase. Our hypothesis implies that among above mentioned latent variables, some of them have a stronger impact on customer experience than the others. Furthermore, there is a significant and positive correlation between customer experience and customer choice. Given hypotheses are the reason to be confirmed after verification of quantitative study’s collected data. The purpose of research is the identification of the factors, which are significantly impacting the retail customer experience on a sportswear market. There are several points that are determined under master thesis’s objective: sportswear market analysis, theoretical aspects’ examination, determining a model of retail customer experience formation and suggesting general recommendations to the market participants.