In order to achieve a competitive advantage, the contemporary tendency amongst retailers is to offer appealing and enduring experiences for their customers. This can be regarded as an effort to create emotional connection with customers through careful planning of tangible and intangible elements. Interactions between customers and the environment in which they do their shopping is the starting point for the formation of relationships between a retailer and its customers. These interactions have rational and emotional dimensions and assist the value-creation process. A well-designed customer experience will also have emotional dimensions that will make it very difficult for other retailers to imitate. Reputation is conceptualised as the outcome of relationships with customers. The relationships that follow from the interactions made possible by customer experiences are of great consequence for the retailer, in terms of building reputation. This paper addresses the route between customer experiences and reputation formation. As such, the paper attempts to contribute to the understanding of the influence of an interdisciplinary activity, namely the creation of shopping experiences for customers by retailers, on corporate reputation.
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