| Summary: | 博士 === 元智大學 === 管理學院博士班 === 99 === When Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004) proposed their experience-centric view, they created a paradigm shift. Based on this new perspective, a firm should consider to enhance their competitiveness by treating customer experiences as their core value. Both the services and products a firm provides can be considered this way. However, the ability to create an experience for the customers cannot be achieved in a short time (Berry, Carbone and Haeckel, 2002).
To understand how a firm creates customer experiences, this research is based on the resource-based view, knowledge-based view and the capability perspective. The case study of Lavender Cottage was chosen based on the research requirements and the development needs of society in Taiwan. In this case study, we considered the creation of an experience and achieving a competitive advantage to be a systematic process of creating and using knowledge. However, the systematic process was based on a core value which is context specific. The core value is the source of the sustainable competitive advantage. Starting from the core value, we divided this process into three stages. First, the validating stage is the process of generating knowledge in order to create an experience. Second, the embodying stage is the stage was the firm uses the knowledge to create experiences for their customers. And, the third stage is the stage of reinforcement in which the firm enhances the knowledge generating process through customer feedback.
We refer to the validating stage of the process as the brewing process in which we foment, hatch and develop a series of activities that eventually translate the core value into explicit knowledge suitable for experience creation. In the brewing process, we further identify three potential factors that may influence the quality of the knowledge obtained and consequently the degree of competitive advantage that will be achieved. In order to define embodying capability we proposed a theoretical framework to describe it. We believe that the knowledge of the employees, storytelling and contextualization can stimulate and enhance the emotional experience of consumers. These experiences by an appropriate group of consumers will then filter through, by word of mouth, to more consumers for the firm. Finally, evidence has shown that customer feedback is strongly related to the development path of Lavender Cottage by enhancing the knowledge generating process retrospectively. In other words, we will argue that the brewing process supports the embodying capability and that the embodying capability helps a firm to create experiences which customers will provide feedback on to the employees and also pass on by word of mouth to other potential customers thereby further enhancing the brewing process. This systematic loop is the basis of the competitive advantage of a service firm.
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