Post-Consumptive Experience in Servicescapes: The Impact of Mental Reenactment on Consumers' Loyalty

摘要

Marketing scholars and practitioners have acknowledged that consumers look for offerings that provide them with unique and memorable experiences. While a large amount of research devoted to experiential consumption has focused on products or brands, this study investigates the impact of sensorimotor perceptions on consumers' cognitive and behavioral responses in servicescapes. The results of an online survey (N = 334) in the spa and wellness industry reveal that visual and motor perceptions of an experience significantly influence the quality of re-experience (i.e., how well a person can remember a past event), while all sensory modalities, except haptics, positively affect the quantity of re-experience (i.e., how often a recall takes place). Direct effects, however, show that without mental reenactment, only sight impressions impact consumers' loyalty. The findings thus support the idea that sensorimotor experiences play an important role for knowledge retrieval and loyalty formation, which is in line with recent embodiment literature. Most importantly, this research demonstrates that triggering re-experience by means of easy-to-implement marketing tools provides a powerful instrument to boost consumers' loyalty in post-consumption stages.