From Selling Point to Experience Point - A Qualitative Exploration of How Millennials Shop Offline and How to Attract Them to Physical Retail Stores

Abstract: The purpose of this thesis is to understand the motivations and expectations of millennials to shop offline in order to find out how retailers can respond to these by means of in-store customer experience and thus create an attractive experience point. We first examined literature in regards to motivations and expectations that influence customer behaviour in order to gain an understanding of the customer perspective. Following this, we elucidated customer experience and its characteristics from a retailer perspective, particularly in-store customer experience. From theory, we identified tech and touch, customer engagement and emotions as particularly relevant aspects of in-store customer experience. Taking the perspective of ontological relativism, we considered customer experience as a co-created phenomenon that is rather socially constructed. We chose a qualitative research approach which allowed for abductive exploration of multiple perspectives within the millennial generation. By means of conducting twelve semi-structured in-depth interviews we were able to gather valuable primary empirical material. We performed a qualitative in-depth analysis by first discovering each interview on its own and then, elevating these findings to a more abstract level by discovering similarities and differences between these interviews. To increase practical relevance of the conducted research, we placed our study in the context of the traditional German retailer Tchibo. We revealed that retailers need to find the right balance between tech and touch, engagement and emotions in the physical retail environment in order to appeal to the millennial’s desires of trust & reliability, feeling of belonging & identification, and control, risk reduction & security in order to create an attractive experience point. By means of this, we emphasised the imperative of emotional experience in offline retailing. In order to create a meaningful customer experience, we derived two major implications from our research. First, “Less is more” which highlights the importance of an appealing in-store environment that focuses on quality rather than quantity. Second, “The perfect fit” which refers to the recruitment of highly skilled store personnel that allows for an authentic and personal customer-retailer relationship. Overall, flexibility by the retailer is required because all factors are interlinked and contribute to the whole customer experience.