Nurturing Partnerships in the Customer Journey: A Case of the Danish Fashion and Beauty Industry

Abstract

This master thesis explores how brands in the Danish beauty and fashion industry can use product-brand-owned nurturing partnership flagship platforms effectively in the customer journey to achieve brand goals. The thesis abductively combines a theoretical foundation of the customer journey and nurturing flagship platforms with semi-structured interviews and observations of both companies and customers in the industry. A such, theoretical concepts are combined with primary data collected in a thematical analysis providing the foundation for a subsequent discussion of relevant findings. From the analysis, it is found that the NPFP can be used to achieve the brand goals of branding, data collection for optimising business processes, sales, and relationship building while fulfilling the customer goals of epistemic empowerment, creative empowerment, social exchange, commercial exchange, and self-improvement. Although, the findings show how the NPFP is effectively used in individual stages of the customer journey to achieve such goals, this thesis concludes that the platform is most effectively used as an all-encompassing phenomenon, affecting all stages in the customer journey on the basis of the subsequent discussion. Brands can thus reap the advantages of highly committed and durable relationships with its customers, characterising the NPFP, which benefit all of its downstream brand goals. Such an integration of NPFPs in the customer journey is ultimately depicted in the author created updated model of the customer journey.