Visual Sensory Cues and Customer Experience Management in Coffee Shops: An Experimental Study of Gender as a Modera-tor

Coffee shops increasingly compete through managed customer experiences rather than through product quality alone. Visual sensory cues, such as interior color, lighting, decoration, spatial aesthetics, product presentation, and menu design, are central to this experience because they frame how consumers interpret the service environment. This study examines whether gender moderates the effect of visual sensory cues on sensory brand experience in coffee shop consumption. A 2 x 2 between-subjects experiment was conducted by manipulating visual sensory cues into strong and weak conditions and comparing female and male participants. A total of 120 coffee shop consumers participated, with 30 participants assigned to each experimental cell. Manipulation checks confirmed that participants distinguished strong from weak visual cue conditions. The hypothesis test showed a significant interaction between gender and visual sensory cues, indicating that gender moderates the relationship between visual design and sensory brand experience. However, the assumptions that female consumers would report higher sensory brand experience under weak visual cues and that male consumers would report higher sensory brand experience under strong visual cues were not supported. The findings suggest that sensory design effects are not universal or linear. Instead, customer experience management in coffee shops depends on the fit between environmental cues and consumer perceptual processing.