The Augmented Brand Display and Its Conversion into Flagship Store-Fueled

In our case, the augmented brand display is made up of four components that stimulate brand experience. One such component is how the consumer perceives the brand’s quality value.

Quality value refers to the product’s ability to serve the consumer’s expected needs (Golder, Mitra, and Moorman 2012; Sweeney and Soutar 2001). Traits that express a brand’s quality value could be the brand name (Dawar and Parker, 1994), ingredients, haptics, taste and/or smell (Tiwari and Singh 2012), information about the manufacturing processes that allow a consistent product performance across new product purchases of the same brand (Golder et al., 2012), or even its complementary use with other brands (Kahn and Wansink, 2004). If consumers have been in contact with marketing activities or product attributes that address the quality value, they possess knowledge that could stimulate brand experience (Frank et al.

2014). For instance, the taste of a product could stimulate enjoyment (feelings/sensations) or the ingredients could stimulate thoughts of healthiness (cognitions), while consistent product performance could stimulate the thought of purchasing the product again (behavior).

Another augmented brand display element that could generate brand experience is the variety of products offered. Product variety signals competence (Berger, Draganska, and Simonson 2007) and can serve specialized through product variations or complementary offers in the

consumption process (Kahn and Wansink 2004). This in turn triggers the feelings, sensations, cognitions, and behaviors that form brand experience (Brakus et al., 2009).

A third component of the augmented brand display that must be considered is the flagship store’s atmosphere. A store’s atmosphere could stimulate consumers’ brand experiences (Babin and Attaway 2000), even when the national brand has no influence upon the atmosphere of the retail stores in which its products are primarily sold (Vahie and Paswan 2006). Product displays, stocking style, lighting, music, or even the store’s cleanliness can lead to emotions and cognitions that affect a consumer’s purchase and consumption processes (Donovan et al. 1994; Turley and Milliman 2000), thereby stimulating brand experiences (Brakus et al., 2009).

Lastly, a fourth component for an augmented brand display is the service quality associated with the brand. Consumers form an impression of the service quality from their contact with sales staff in retail stores or brand representatives from customer hotlines and social media platforms (e.g., Grace and O’Cass, 2004; Lemke et al., 2011; Padgett and Allen, 1997). The availability, friendliness, or problem-solving competence of the service enables consumers to judge the service quality of a brand (Brady et al. 2005). Even if the service is not performed by brand-affiliated personnel, as is generally the case for FMCG brands that use retailers as their main distribution channel, the service quality still induces feelings, cognitions, or behavioral responses (components of brand experience; Brakus et al., 2009) that are connected to the brand of interest (Grace and O’Cass 2004; Ismail 2011). Altogether, these four components form the augmented brand display, which creates brand experiences prior to entering a flagship store.

In the flagship store itself, the augmented brand display is tailored to the brand and directed as desired toward consumers. Different theme zones in which consumers can engage with components of the augmented brand display transform into stronger brand experiences

(Kozinets et al. 2002), which we refer to as flagship store-fueled brand experiences. For instance, information about the brand’s manufacturing processes or history signals quality to consumers, as a rich history improves the perception of competence (Borghini et al. 2009;

Hollenbeck, Peters, and Zinkhan 2008). This in turn strengthens the emotional or cognitive components of brand experience. Furthermore, offering exclusive flagship store products or a larger variety of products stimulates consumers’ perception that the brand is better able to serve their needs (Manlow and Nobbs 2013) and is therefore likely to trigger cognitive and behavioral components of brand experience (Brakus, Schmitt, and Zarantonello 2009). Store lighting, colors, or even the materials used in product display racks could create an atmosphere that enhances the consumer’s state of emotional well-being (Doyle et al. 2008). In addition, engaging with the flagship store’s staff who serve as brand ambassadors enables consumers to experience new services. The more knowledgeable the staff is, the likelier it is that cognitive or behavioral components of brand experience will be activated for the consumer (Doyle et al., 2008; Khan and Rahman, 2015). Therefore, Hypotheses 1 and 2 are posed as follows:

H1: The augmented brand display creates positive brand experiences.

H2: The flagship store visit fosters the creation of brand experience through an augmented brand display, leading to flagship store-fueled brand experiences.

However, consumers have limited processing resources: not all stimuli from a flagship store-fueled brand experience can be taken in at once (Ehrenberg 2000; Schiffman, Kanuk, and Hansen 2008). Therefore, consumers can decode the stimuli more thoroughly if they are processed consecutively, adding to their experience base step by step rather than en masse, because more cognitive resources are available to interpret the thus far unidentified stimuli (Erdem et al. 1999; van Osselaer and Alba 2000). As Hollenbeck et al. (2008) state, repeat visits to experiential stores, such as flagship stores, enable a continued acquisition of new

stories about the brand; consumers can then compare these new stories with previously learned and experienced ones, updating any perceptions as necessary. For the augmented brand display, consumer learning through repeated flagship store visits could impact the acquisition of stimuli for flagship store-fueled brand experience: as Gregan-Paxton and John (1997) as well as El Houssi, Morel, and Hultink (2009) explain, consumers tend to recognize the previously learned stimuli in their knowledge base first. This implies that multiple flagship store visits facilitate stimuli recognition and add to the flagship store-fueled brand experience base. Consequently, Hypothesis 3 is presented as follows:

H3: The effect of the augmented brand display on flagship store-fueled brand experience is reinforced by previous flagship store visits.

2.2.4 Flagship Store-Fueled Brand Experience, Brand Cognitions, and