Tell me a story about yourself: The words of shopping experience and self-satisfaction

TL;DR

This study explores how customers verbally express their shopping experiences and emotions, revealing the importance of emotional and self-related factors in shopping satisfaction through text and social network analysis.

Contribution

It introduces novel text mining and social network analysis methods to analyze customer interviews about shopping experiences and emotions.

Findings

Emotions play a prominent role in shopping discourse.

Customers link shopping experiences to self-satisfaction and identity.

Enhancing hedonic aspects can improve retail satisfaction.

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the verbal expression of shopping experience obtained by a sample of customers asked to freely verbalize how they felt when entering a store. Using novel tools of Text Mining and Social Network Analysis, we analyzed the interviews to understand the connection between the emotions aroused during the shopping experience, satisfaction and the way participants link these concepts to self-satisfaction and self-identity. The results show a prominent role of emotions in the discourse about the shopping experience before purchasing and an inward-looking connection to the self. Our results also suggest that modern retail environment should enhance the hedonic shopping experience in terms of fun, fantasy, moods, and emotions.