Hugo Boss New Concept Store in Milan: an Analysis of Customer Reactions

As a major subject, this paper addressed the profound renovation of retailing strategies in the upscale fashion industry and the gradual shift from promoting the product to capturing and retaining the customer through Experiential Marketing – cognitive communication through providing of experiences (Schmitt, 1999; Ben-Ze’ev A., 2000, and Elster J., 1999). The overcrowdness of the specific industry (Burns, Enright et al., 2007) and the perpetual search for differentiation (Porter, 1985) have been described as antecedents of this retail renewal. “The store has become the hero” . An assessment of the background served to demonstrate how this phenomenon is particularly pertinent in the Italian market, where the modern customer has the peculiar characteristics for appreciating an emotional approach, rather than an utilitarian one (Holbrook et al. 2001): for instance, his hedonism and individualism, and his poor time availability. In particular, Experiential Marketing was assumed to be effective when dealing with branding issues, such as a substantial lack of brand awareness and a weak brand image. With the intention of examining its effectiveness, the paper focuses on some limited areas of investigation, but still eligible to be extended to a broader context. Hugo Boss Italia has served as a perfect study case, given its peculiar branding issues that the paper was intending to address. The Concept Store – a multidimensional media delivering emotions (Pine, Gilmore, 1999) - has been investigated as a particular Experiential Marketing application, for recently arising as an interesting but yet not very well known branding tool. This has been defined as characterised by 4 elements: Structure, Assortment, Service and Interactions. Its theoretical effectiveness is immediately clear and further enhanced by an extensive review of the relevant literature. In particular, some propositions on the antecedents and consequences of brand awareness and brand image in retailing have been drawn. Brand awareness - the ability to recognise, or recall, that a brand is a member of a certain product category, and the ability to identify the brand under conditions of complexity and time pressure (Aaker, 1991) - antecedents have been found in information (Sharma et al., 2001), and store location and environment (Donovan, Rossier at al., 2006), whereas its main arisen consequence has been store loyalty (Reichheld, 2006). Brand image - a synthesis of a consumer’s brand perceptions which depends on the strength of the cognitive and emotional associations evoked by the brand, and even on the impact they have on each others (Keller, 1998) - antecedents have been found in service quality (Duckler, 2001), and “multisensoriality” of the store (Holbrook, 2001), whereas its main arisen consequence has been brand loyalty (Aaker, 1991; Keller, 1993). For enriching the latter evidence with a practical insight from real life, a research design is presented and the hypothesis are validated by means of an empirical study. served as research issue. In order to determine the Concept Store effectiveness with respect to the relevant two branding issues, the following interrelated research questions have been formulated: what is the impact of each Concept Store factor on brand awareness and brand image, and what are the retail antecedents and consequences of brand awareness and brand image. 12 in-depth interviews have been conducted on individuals that showed peculiarities that make them similar to the Hugo Boss target customer, through the use of Autodriving technique. Its results have been quantitatively and qualitatively analysed through the use of 3 different approaches: cluster analysis, concordance – KWIC analysis, and word frequency analysis. Key findings have been finally summarized in an empirical model.