Measuring Emotional and Rational Drivers in Retail Customer Journeys Beyond Surveys

Abstract

This paper argues that customer journey, brand, and innovation-related decisions in retail should not rely only on self-reported data and questionnaire analytics, especially when evaluating the emotional and rational drivers of consumer behaviour. In practice, surveys remain a major source of evidence for assessing communication effectiveness, touchpoint quality, packaging evaluation, and brand performance. However, self-reports often capture declared preferences and post hoc rationalisations rather than the processes that shape attention, arousal, and affect during exposure. As a result, retailers may optimise communication, touchpoints, and product or packaging presentation on incomplete evidence.

The paper proposes a dual-layer framework for measuring retail customer journeys that captures both declarative and process-sensitive components of consumer response. The first layer covers explicit evaluations, including attribute importance, trust, preferences, and purchase intentions. The second layer captures implicit signals, including visual attention patterns, physiological arousal, and affective responses during exposure to retail stimuli. The framework integrates both layers across key journey stages and links them to communication design, touchpoint prioritisation, brand consistency management, and the evaluation of retail changes across touchpoints.

Methodologically, the paper is conceptual and practice-oriented, supported by a secondary cross-study synthesis of proprietary neurolab studies conducted in a university research setting. The included studies span multiple retail contexts, including advertising, online retail environments, packaging presentation, and product experience. They are not treated as one pooled empirical dataset. Instead, they reveal a recurring managerial risk: decisions based only on questionnaire results would have supported different recommendations than decisions informed by combined explicit and implicit evidence. Across the included studies, the dual-layer approach identifies hidden friction points, underestimated brand effects, failures of perceptual access, and mismatches between declared choice logic and experienced response.

The paper contributes a framework for measuring emotional and rational drivers beyond surveys, a perspective on implicit signals as decision-relevant evidence in retail customer journey analysis, and practical guidance for combining declarative and biometric data across touchpoints. It also highlights how such evidence can support the evaluation of retail changes, redesign decisions, and selected innovation-related actions. The paper concludes with implications for practice and directions for further validation.