Resumo

Despite data management's fast evolution, technology will hardly replace human interaction (higher tech, higher touch) (Gummesson, 2017). As luxury customers are closer than ever to brands, it creates a challenging scope, mainly when associating technology and experience (Rathi, Garg, Kataria, and Chhikara, 2022). Relationship marketing in luxury consists of developing through managing customer information strategy, effortless actions to know consumers better, and tailored customer experience and technology (Guo-feng & Xiao-wen, 2006).

The research goal is to explore clienteling approach, capturing the opinions of fashion luxury retail specialists in an emerging country, with the questions presented as: (RQ1): What is the concept of clienteling in fashion luxury retailing? (RQ2): What are the main clienteling strategies applied in fashion luxury retailing? (RQ3): How is clienteling comprehended from strategic, organizational, and customer perspectives? (RQ4): How is the association of clienteling and technology, for now, and for the future?

Relationship marketing (RM) can help luxury companies manage customer relationships (Guo-feng & Xiao-wen, 2006). RM in luxury consists of developing through managing customer information strategy, and effortless actions to know consumers’ tailored experience (Guo-feng & Xiao-wen, 2006). Already considered an essential driver for investment (Willersdorf et al., 2020), clienteling in the literature appears with different writing and meanings, such as clientelling, clienteling, clientelling 2.0, and digital clienteling. In this research, the term adopted is clienteling.

With a qualitative exploratory approach (Barnham, 2015), the technique of a questionnaire with open-ended questions (Baker, 2003) was applied through online surveys (Sam & Jankowski, 2006; Regmi et al., 2016). With 20 specialists in luxury fashion retail in Brazil, we applied content analysis (Gilmore & Carson, 1996; Krippendorf, 2004) with both deductive and inductive approaches (Krippendorf, 2004). With an interpretative emphasis (Gilmore & Carson, 1996), data was organized by units of analyses (words and sentences), associating them to each participant's code.

In response to RQ1, clienteling still has different but complementary perspectives from market specialists and still lacks a definition from a luxury perspective, which allows us to define that clienteling involves a set of relationship marketing strategies, commercial and non-commercial, based on customer history with the company (salesperson), created to attend to higher-tier customer preferences in a personalized and exclusive way. RQ2 presents a list of strategies that are classified as. RQ3 answers how it is organized and managed, and RQ4 indicates future perspectives of clienteling.

This study accessed an area of application of clienteling. The data provided allowed us to answer all research questions. We were able to (1) propose a definition of clienteling in fashion luxury retail associated with RM theorization, (2) identify and describe the actual practices involved with detailed examples, (3) understand these activities' strategic, organizational, and customer relationships, (4) present a view of the future for clienteling and technology. Our propositions are the first step in theorizing the clienteling practices in academia.

Guo-feng, L., & Xiao-wen, L. (2006, October). Implementing Relationship Marketing in the Luxury Sector. In 2006 International Conference on Management Science and Engineering (pp. 886-890). IEEE. Gilmore, A., & Carson, D. (1996). “Integrative” qualitative methods in a services context. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 14(6), 21-26. Rathi, R., Garg, R., Kataria, A., & Chhikara, R. (2022). Evolution of luxury marketing landscape: a bibliometric analysis and future directions. Journal of Brand Management, 29(3), 241-257.