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The purpose of this paper is to differentiate local versus global brand associations in an emerging market (Turkey)’s coffee shop market.

Two leading coffee shop brands – one local and one global – were analyzed with an emerging exploratory research technique – brand concept mapping (BCM) – to reveal their strong, favorable and unique associations leading them to market leadership.

The results indicate that, these two successful brands both have distinctive, yet relevant positions in their consumers’ mind. Local cultural experience is relevant for differentiating local brands, even if the coffee shop concept is globally imported. Global coffee shop brand, on the other hand, means membership to global middle income segment and is remembered as global fast coffee service.

The main limitation of this exploratory study is the sample size limitation by its nature. So, the generalizability of the results should be approached with caution. Researchers use BCM technique; however, this method does not permit to reveal the expected levels and the importance of the attributes. Thus, further research are suggested to be complementary.

This study fills the research gap in revealing and comparing local vs global brand associations by using BCM technique, which enables one to measure the strength, unique and favorable associations/brand images more suitable to Keller’s (1993) conceptualization. This study pioneers in using this technique in international branding.

In recent years, with the development of technology, the number of contact points between companies and their customers has multiplied. From the company point of view, companies may reach their customers through multiple marketing channels. Moreover, business intelligence necessitates increasing data sources, strengthening the power of analysis tools, and developing knowledge to be used as a competitive advantage. On the other hand, today’s mostly digitized customers expect more than just commoditized products or services. Customer activation creates experiences that make them feel strong as agents perpetrating the structure (brand strategies) by taking an active role instead of being passive. In other terms, customers are in the main decision position to plan the structure. Thus, companies should design unique and memorable customer experiences through different channels in an integrated way, which is called omnichannel. Omnichannel customer experience management is possible by determining and coordinating customer touch points. In other terms, a melody should exist at these interaction points. This book aims to contribute to this advancement by first providing general reviews of the literature, then covering the pillars to design omnichannel customer experiences, and lastly providing technology-enhanced applications from several industries. This book aims also to provide fresh conceptual insights and thinking about the ways to design and develop omnichannel customer experiences.

Understanding the customer has been the focus of attention of businesses and academia for many decades. Starting in 1960s, complex buyer behavior models developed by Nicosia, by Howard and Sheth (1969), were followed by Engel, Blackwell and Miniard in 1978 (Engel, Blackwell, & Miniard, 1990) to understand the buying process, shaping the thoughts today about consumers’ experiences in an omnichannel world. Interest in customer perceptions and expectations (Parasuraman, Berry, & Zeithaml, 1991), SERVQUAL (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Leonard, 1985) and SERVPERV (Cronin & Taylor, 1994) moved the academia to discuss the relationship marketing (Morgan & Hunt, 1994; Parvatiyar & Sheth, 1999; Peterson, 1995; Sheth & Parvatiyar, 1995). Wilson’s model (1995) of buyer–seller relationships extended the former models with additional concepts like social bonds, comparison level of alternatives, power roles, technology, structural bonds and cooperation as influencers on relationship development stages. His emphasis reflects a high relevancy in the omnichannel world of customers’ interactions today. Winer (2001), a pioneer to discuss the customer relationship management focused on a database to know about customers’ purchase history and interests. The millennium look at customer lifetime value is again relationship focused. For Fader, Hardie, and Lee (2005) rather the long-term focus of the consumer value and actions are important to understand the loyalty and nonlinear nature of relations. While Reinartz and Kumar (2003) focused on profitable customer lifetime and customer heterogeneity, Verhoef (2003) analyzed the impact of customers’ relationship perceptions and relationship marketing instruments on both customer retention and customer share development. The customer-centric thinking was first discussed by Grönroos (2006) within a new definition of marketing. The service dominant logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2008) resulted in the next highlight, the co-creation of value with customer involvement and customer advisory (Güngör, 2012; Güngör & Bilgin, 2011; Messner, 2007) empowering the customers and giving them the control over the supplier networks. Different factors will be influential at different stages of the buying process of customer clusters. The Web- and non-Web-based customer-centric measures can be multifold. Andersson, Movin, Mähring, Teigland, and Wennberg (2018) and Bank (2018) emphasize the importance of technology readiness focus throughout the customer–supplier journey. The question to be answered is, to which extent the empowered customers and the suppliers of this age are ready to adopt, embrace and finally use new technologies in the omnichannel world of holistic interactions that form new visions, expectations, values and desires in a tremendous speed. Ideas and experiences are shared and exchanged in online communities without the need of the involvement of the suppliers. This “holistic view” challenges firms further through the seamlessness it requires to create unity. Customer-centric research needs a new push for the development of instruments and measures to cope with the consumer decision process challenges. Process thinking is needed to capture the purchasing habits in an omnichannel world and to build a new thought for customer journey experience with the aim to understand technology-linked value propositions of customer clusters to optimize channel interactions. Customer journeys have to focus and describe the online/offline experiences at the hybrid shopping mile, trace the behavioral influential factors of the customers’ and sellers’ world in a technological environment. This chapter will discuss “Technology based Orbit Interactions” for “The Hybrid Shopping Mile and its Customer Journey Mapping” with a “Customer Intelligence Framework.” The outcome of the hybrid customer journey mapping gives orientation for customer-management decisions in developing new approaches.

Besides having an important place in the daily lives of today’s consumers, technology impacts consumer behavior in variety of ways such as giving direction to their buying behavior, changing the characteristics that they expect from a product and the value they perceive, and influencing their satisfaction about the product. When omnichannel marketing is analyzed in this respect, it is an important issue that should be considered for the success of the marketing activities of the enterprises. This chapter will explain the single channel first and then multichannel marketing and omnichannel marketing concepts. The potential effects of omnichannel usage on issues about consumer behavior such as brand loyalty, customer satisfaction, perceived brand value, and buying behavior will be explained in detail. Then, the characteristics of the consumers using omnichannel and the factors affecting the success of these continents in terms of both consumers and businesses will be discussed. In this chapter, omnichannel marketing application examples will also be discussed in detail.

The main purpose of this chapter is to examine the attitudes and behaviors of digital consumers in omnichannel world. For this purpose, in order to understand the behavior of digital consumers, literature review has been made. The transformation of traditional consumers into digital consumers has been examined within the framework of marketing periods. What are the new types of consumers and demographic and psychographic characteristics of these, and how they are segmented in the market are important issues. Another important issue is how digital environmental factors affect digital consumers when shopping online. Purchasing processes of digital consumers and their behaviors, which channels they use and how they make purchasing decisions play an important role in understanding digital consumer behaviors. After the purchasing decision, it is examined whether digital consumers will transfer their experiences to other consumers, satisfaction and loyalty experiences, and whether they will buy again in digital environmental.

Marketplaces are changing, and customers are demanding improved experiences where they want, how they want, and when they want. The omnichannel concept is perceived as an evolution of multichannel retailing, which implies a blurring division between the physical and online stores. In the omnichannel environment, customers move freely among physical and online stores expecting seamless shopping experiences between channels. Among different generational consumer groups, Gen Z deserves marketers’ particular attention, which is the new rising segment for omnichannel experiences. The purpose of this chapter is first to verify the essence of generational differences in consumer’s omnichannel buying behavior by giving a special focus on the Gen Z segment. Secondly, this chapter discusses how retailers should integrate their online and offline store channels to provide the best retail brand experience to these distinctive Gen Z consumers.

As the world moves toward globalization, new trends and applications are on the rise as an attempt to meet the ever-changing needs of consumers. In this sense, new technologies have been introduced as a means to differentiate the product and service offerings along with some emerging retailing perspectives. It is obvious that omnichannel retailing is cited as one of the emerging trends in marketing. In this globe, customer experience management plays a crucial role in establishing sustainable omnichannel retailing strategies. Considering all the variables in the business environment, it is seen that effective tools of omnichannel operations should well be implemented as a response to effectively compete in the business environment. This chapter reveals some of the major literature and applications in the context of omnichannel retailing whereby the most concern of interest is given to the importance of customer experience and its formation.

In retail industry, it is very important that companies start to own an omnichannel approach in order provide an integrated experience. This approach is recognized as a key to have sustainable growth for companies and brands. In this study, it is aimed to examine the application of omnichannel decisions in different marketing channels and the contributions of this approach in the strategic plans of companies to create an overall customer experience in Turkey. For this purpose, a thorough literature review was provided on different marketing channel approaches, especially retailing and wholesales. In-depth interviews with companies showed that companies in Turkey are underway to include omnichannel approach in their short-term plans to improve their sales volume, and these companies also use this approach as a positioning by creating an integrated customer experience through customer relationship management.