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Introduction
Over the past few decades, the retail sector has witnessed significant change (increased fashion consciousness among customers, more emphasis on experiential shopping, more demanding and assertive consumers, growing multiple channel retail strategies, retailer consolidation, globalization and technological advancements, etc.) and increased competition (Krafft and Mantrala, 2006). These changes have led to further change in not only the way business operations are conducted but also in emphasis on what to capitalize upon from a business point of view. For example, changes in the retail environment have necessitated well-designed multi-channel operations to provide better retail experiences to customers (Mathwick et al. , 2001). Pine and Gilmore (1999) stressed that retailers were "experience stagers" and sources of relevant memories rather than merely providers of goods and services. According to Brocato et al. (2012), experience is a necessary component in the "brick-and-mortar" retail setting because of the inseparability of service-oriented deliveries. Studies have also termed brick-and-mortar retailers as the "retail interactive theater" because they create and provide pleasurable experiences to customers through activities such as organizing events, encouraging staff to offer suggestions to customers as and when required, educating consumers, etc. (Pine and Gilmore, 1999; Sands et al. , 2008). Krafft and Mantrala (2006), in their book, "Retailing in the 21st century", named such customer experience management the "third wave of marketing intelligence". In recent years, retail organizations and academics have also acknowledged the importance of managing experiences evoked through retail brands (Mathews-Lefebvre and Dubois, 2013; Verhoef et al. , 2009).
The concept of branding in retail research has, through the years, evolved from "product as brand" (product brand) to "store as brand" (store brand), and subsequently, to "retailer as brand" (retail brand) (Burt and Davies, 2010; Leingpibul et al. , 2013), thus establishing that retailer be viewed as a brand itself (Grewal et al. , 2004; Khan and Rahman, 2015). The Journal of Retailing (2004, vol. 80, issue 4) published a special issue devoted to "Retail Branding and Customer Loyalty" wherein the need to understand the retailer as a brand was emphasized. Stressing on the same perspective, Das et al. (2012) stated:
As a shopper, we most often take the name of a particular retail store. If somebody asks us "where are you going for shopping?"...