The effect of customers' brand experience on brand evangelism: The case of luxury hotels

Abstract

Despite growing insight into customers' brand experience, its effect on brand evangelism, or a customer's intense brand support behavior, remains tenuous, exposing an important literature-based gap. Addressing this gap, we adopt a Service-Dominant logic/Consumer Culture Theory perspective to uncover how customers' brand experience dimensions drive their evangelistic behavior for luxury hotels. Addressing these issues, Study 1 analyzes customers' TripAdvisor reviews for six five-star hotels to identify key brand experience themes using content analysis (e.g., human interaction/emotion). Study 2 explores the brand experience/evangelism interface by identifying differences for highly (vs. modestly) evangelistic customers by using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (n = 396 five-star hotel customers). The results reveal human interaction-based hotel attentiveness/caring and emotion-based indulgence as necessary conditions for brand evangelism. Key differences across highly (vs. modestly) evangelistic customers' perceived hotel-based pandemic management and physical environment-based tangible sensorial experience are also identified. We conclude by discussing key implications arising from our analyses.