What is so special about the sharing economy: The customer experience view

Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Business and Management, Department of Management, Kolejní 2906/4, 612 00 Brno, Czech Republic

^* Corresponding author: david.havir@vutbr.cz

Abstract

Research background: From time to time utilization of modern technology innovatively disrupts the industry, as is true for sharing economy companies such as Airbnb and Uber. These companies achieved global success with their platform-enabled businesses connecting the demand of individuals with underutilized resources of others. Besides the competitive prices enabled by controversial practices, they are widely criticized for, these companies attracted masses of customers, not only the price-sensitive ones. Relating to that, the recent marketing phenomenon of customer experience is aiming to help companies systematically understand the perception and resulting actions of customers, and to better manage their marketing mix to gain competitive advantage and increase overall performance.

Purpose of the article: The purpose of this article is to explore the nature of customer experience in the area of sharing economy to better understand the importance of experiential factors the marketing metrics of sharing economy companies are driven by.

Methods: The research is based on the pilot data collection through online and offline surveys and the subsequent partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) analysis of the data from 86 respondents.

Findings & Value added: This paper provides insight into the area of sharing economy through the identification of the factors of needs fulfillment level (particularly social) and effective resource management during the customer experience as the ones with the positive effect (medium and weak-medium) on the memorized customer experience quality, while the human perception engagement is surprisingly found as the weak contributor. The memorized customer experience quality was found to have a medium positive effect on customer satisfaction which further has the medium-strong positive effect on the positive word-of-mouth and customer loyalty of customers of the sharing economy companies.