Understanding Social Media & Future Experience

Marketers intensely continue to capture economic value by leveraging social media platforms besides improving customer experience. Social media has transformed how fashion is designed, presented, reported, and consumed. The growing attention to customer experience arises in parallel with the complex customer journeys, in which myriad touchpoints interaction is comprehensively used between firms and customers in multiple channels and media. Despite centring on customer experience for sustainable growth, little is known about the future experience across the customer journey (pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase). This chapter attempts to contribute to the existing Lemon and Verhoef (J Market 80:69–96, 2016) model by providing attention to the limited role of future experience in shaping customer experiences. The authors suggest that social media stimulus influences customers’ initial expectations and builds one’s future experience. Hence, this study aims to delineate the role social media stimuli can play in shaping future experiences, thus producing a novelty in conceptualising future experience. Accordingly, a broad critical literature review provides an extant theory contributing to the proposed model. Findings illustrate that owned social media (OSM) and earned social media (ESM) are the key dimensions contributing to future experiences. OSM denotes a brand’s content sharing through its online social network assets. ESM discusses the brand-related content created by consumers through online social networks. The findings of this study are likely to provide valuable insights into the literature development and offer key managerial implications in the fashion industry. Thus, this chapter suggests future work development as future experience is a relatively new “greenfield” area for future research.