تاثیر قابلیت نوآوری و تجربه مشتری در مورد اعتبار و وفاداری  Influence of innovation capability and customer experience on reputation and loyalty

1. Introduction Some studies present innovation and marketing as the two aspects central to the organizations’ ability to gain capital in a competitive market (Ngo & O’Cass, 2013; Nguyen, Yu, Melewar, & Gupta, 2016). Incidentally, retailers around the globe, including Europe, are aware of the new possibilities that innovation (e.g., Smart Labels and Unique Identifiers, and NFC payments) can offer in a retail environment. However, the change goes beyond simply introducing or making use of innovation, as this phenomenon creates both challenges and marketing opportunities for corporations. Marketers get favorable reputations to allow stakeholders to form positive perceptions about the corporation and thus, to retain customer loyalty (Chun, 2005). In this sense, the academic literature reports the capability of innovation to drive company reputation and customer loyalty (Gupta & Malhotra, 2013) and reflects on reputation as collective judgments that observers make according to their evaluation of the corporation’s ability to be innovative (Foroudi, Melewar, & Gupta, 2014). Balmer, Powell, and Greyser (2011) add that corporate reputation is the result of beliefs, images, facts, and experiences that an individual may encounter over time. Consumers perceive a company as trustworthy and respectful because of their experience with the company, its products and services, and their corporate reputation (Bhattacharya & Sen, 2003). These behaviors can affect the likelihood of customers’ identification with different demographic features and with the organization. Socio-technical system theory classifies the innovation capability of companies into two categories: (1) technical innovation capability (development of new services, service operations, and technology) and (2) non-technical innovation capability (managerial, market, and marketing) (Ngo & O’Cass, 2013). According to Ngo and O’Cass (2013), the literature pays much attention to technical innovation whereas nontechnical innovation, such as management, sales, and marketing, has received little attention to date. Few studies focus on the specific experiences that favorably affect consumers’ affective and cognitive reactions (Dennis, Brakus, Gupta, & Alamanos, 2014). To fill this gap and using theory of complexity, this study pushes the existing boundaries of the link between innovation capability as a management concept, connecting innovation capability with customer experience, reputation, and loyalty as marketing concepts. The arguments defend that the ability of a company offering a product or a service to create a strong position in a highpotential market depends upon the level to which the company is able to influence the experiences of its consumers, according to their demographic features and with or without using technology. The theory of complexity provides a clear reflection of non-linearity between the links under investigation in a competitive market and under a situation of uncertainty. In addition, the study also investigates the influence of the consumers’ demographics (age, gender, occupation,  and education) on the linearity of such links. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to identify configurations that can describe customer experience for retailers operating in retail settings. The key findings enable managers to understand how the deployment of the technical innovation capability (developing new services, service operations, and technology) and the non-technical innovation capability (managerial, market, and marketing) in the retail environment can link consumer’s shopping experience with reputation of the firm and customers’ loyalty. This research achieves its objective using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) (Ragin, 2006, 2008). Both analyses provide a deeper and richer perspective on the data when they work together with complexity theory (Mikalef, Pateli, Batenburg, & Wetering, 2015; Ordanini, Parasuraman, & Rubera, 2013; Woodside, 2014; Wu, Yeh & Woodside, 2014).