The role of Marketers' Knowledge and Motivation in the Generation of Positive Customer Experience

In today's fast-paced, globalized, and interconnected world, creating and delivering strong and enduring customer experiences during the entire customer's purchase journey have become a critical condition to attract and retain clients. However, knowledge and motivational antecedents giving rise to superior performance in this domain have not been addressed in previous research. This paper tries to overcome this research gap by analyzing how marketing-specific human capital and motivation contribute to the generation and delivery of successful customer experiences. To that end, a questionnaire was designed and administered to a representative sample of 346 Spanish firms with more than 100 employees, and SEM based on PLS was then applied to test the hypotheses put forward by the research. Our results show that motivation affects customer experience both directly and indirectly by increasing the marketing-specific knowledge of employees in the marketing function. Moreover, customer knowledge and marketing-related skills are the only constituents of marketing-specific human capital that significantly affect customer experience.