Building phygital experiences through optichannel retail. The future of luxury fashion stores.

Customer experience (CX) is set to be a major source of competitive advantage, enhancing brand positioning, customer engagement, and long-term loyalty (De Bonis et al., 2020). As postmodern consumers ascribe anything they interact with, even places, with a representation of the self (Debord, 2012), the new source of value will be neither the product nor the brand, but the resulting holistic CX (Hoolbrook, 1996), which will turn into a key management tool to market brand image and positioning. As an experience occurs wherever and whenever a customer gets into contact with a brand throughout many touchpoints, retail becomes crucial in its building (Brakus et al., 2009), entailing a more customer-centric and experience-based approach. This triggers the need for managers to define a new role and new characteristics of stores to make them relevant to these new retail strategies as a value-adding element where customers can “live” the brand itself. This thesis studies why and how luxury retail should become more experiential and customer-centric, and which role and features luxury fashion stores should have to build consistent retail and CX strategies, as the boundaries between online and offline increasingly blur. The analysis includes a theoretical and an empirical research: the former compiles past literature about CX and retail to examine their evolving notions and connection, while the latter combines case studies and semi-structured interviews to highlight the emerging role and characteristics of luxury fashion stores, drawing managerial implications for building relevant retail strategies in the near future.