Corporate Training and Development in the USA and Canada

Considering the choices made in connection to the thesis’s theoretical proposition for real life application, the thesis reflects on the domain of Ontology. The social constructivist paradigm views that the reality is dependent on perceptions hold by individuals and also the social interactions between them (Saunders et al., 2009).

Consider for example, the concept of customer experience is primarily founded on the interactions between customers and the service providers; it is thus very situation specific and personal in nature (Caru & Cova, 2003). Customers construct the reality by interpreting and giving meanings to the course of multiple experiences (Ibid). However, it is not unlikely that individual customers will perceive similar experiences differently as a consequence of their own view of the world. 

From experience theories, this thesis will not look at experiential marketing (Schmitt, 1999) mainly because it is not directly relevant with the focus of this thesis. 

Usually experiential marketing includes marketing communications such as advertisements, websites, co-branding, packaging of products, etc. (Schmitt, 1999). As such, its applicability is narrow focused, takes in the form of a more tactical and functional level i.e. by marketing department (Voss et al., 2008). Instead, this thesis will focus on the strategic guidance of designing and delivering total customer experience which needs to be incorporated throughout an organization.The study of consumer behavior covers a wide range of topics such as customers’ motivations and goals to buy products or services, their learning process etc. However, covering such theories is out of this thesis’s context, thus will not be reviewed. Mainly the formation of customer perception and customer satisfaction will be analyzed in connection with customer experience. From the brand management, the study does not cover aspects of product branding, which share common premises as experiential marketing. Instead, to answer the research statement, this paper looks at the perspective of service branding, which share common fundamentals as corporate branding. In order to understand how customers make sense of their experience with service providers, customers’ internal state and the context-dependent social surroundings need to be examined, which in turn will help companies to understand customers’ motivations and actions in meaningful ways (Saunders et al., 2009). 

The Case Company – Enemærke & Petersen a/s

To rationalize the conceptual CEM framework derived from the predominant theories to the real business situation, Enemærke & Petersen a/s (E&P) is chosen as the case company. The main criteria for choosing a non-experience-centric service company like E&P is, the company has been working to be customer focused for last five years. It provides opportunity to analyze whether and how E&P applied the same strategies as other experience-centric services, to promote differentiation and increase customer loyalty along with financial performance. The philosophy of epistemology deals with the specific set of knowledge that researchers consider important from their point of view (Saunders et al., 2009). Furthermore, it defines the nature of knowledge, the source i.e. the context of knowledge and how the acquired knowledge can be used to find the universal truths (Gomm et al., 2000).The knowledge on CEM this thesis seeks to produce is dependent on E&P’s context and thus cannot be characterized as a definite truth. This is also the case for social science that “has not succeeded in producing general, context-independent theory and thus, has in the final instance nothing else to offer than concrete, context-dependent knowledge” (Flyvbjerg, 2006, p.223). Furthermore, from social constructivism perspective the constructed knowledge reflects the perception of reality which is dependent on interaction between individuals (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). Therefore, the foundations of this thesis’s findings are influenced by the author’s subjective interpretation of the reality.

Delimitations

Working towards answering the aforementioned research statement, this thesis focuses only on service companies from the business-to-business (B2B) as opposed to business-to- consumer (B2C) perspective. Evidence suggests that an increasing number of service companies are moving towards the paradigm of delivering customer experiences (Zomerdijk & Voss, 2009). It has thus become interesting to analyze whether and how these service companies can be benefited by incorporating experience notion into their business situation. Usually in a B2B environment, the organizational customer groups represent diverse individuals, thus the decision making process offers greater complexity as opposed to a B2C situation (Arnould et al., 2005). As such, this thesis holds the view that analyzing service companies in B2B setting would give greater opportunity for data on complex interactions among customer groups. Even though many research works can be found relating the concept of experience in B2C situations, the impact of experience in B2B context has largely been ignored (Biedenbach & Marell, 2010). By realizing the gap, this thesis will focus on exploring the effects of customer experience in a B2B service setting. Furthermore, taking consideration of theoretical delimitation, the thesis will be focusing on experience management, consumer behavior and brand management theories. As the theoretical discussion will move on, justifications for using each of these theories will be presented in respective sections. But for the moment, it will be explained very briefly which sub-sections that are not focused of the three broad theories.