Conceptualizing Customer Experience in Organic Food Purchase Using Cognitive-Affective-Behavior Model

Abstract

Researchers have shifted their focus to investigating the cognitive, emotional, and behavioural elements of the customer’s consumption experience following the application of a customer-centric approach by businesses in their operations. This review paper attempts to conceptualize the role of customer experiences (CE) of retail organic foods using the lens of the Cognitive-Affective-Behaviour (C-A-B) theory. C-A-B is chosen as it is a widely used theory to explain an individual’s comprehensive evaluation of an object, which represents their personal cognitive, emotional, and behavioural responses. Particularly, the C-A-B model reflects the direct effect that cognition has on emotional responses, which then drives collective behaviour, which in turn works as the motivation for a person to participate in a certain behaviour. From the review, CE is suggested to show positive and negative influences respectively on green experiential satisfaction and retail organic food repurchase intention. The links suggested amongst the variables would help to extend the cognition-affection-behavioural framework to the green retail contexts by testing a novel relationship of understanding consumers’ green behaviour. The findings may also demonstrate the importance of promoting sustainable store strategies that create favourable customer experiences of themselves. It is also expected that this insight will help to improve, both practically and theoretically, the customer experience measurement tools used in the green retail service industry, as well as to broaden and deepen our understanding of The Theory of Cognitive-Affective-Behaviour (CAB).