In today’s competitive business environment, where smart marketing has emerged as a data-driven strategy emphasizing deep customer-brand interactions, understanding and analyzing customer experience plays a crucial role in creating sustainable competitive advantages.

This research follows a qualitative and exploratory design, utilizing a snowball sampling technique to collect data through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 15 industry experts and academics. For the first time in this field, the study integrates adaptive thematic analysis with ISM in a dual-methodology approach, enabling the extraction of key themes and the systematic mapping of interrelationships among critical variables. The findings reveal that at the foundational level, brand visual characteristics and geographic positioning serve as the primary elements shaping customer experience. At the second level, customer-centric values, including service value, social and ethical value, purchasing motivations, and product value, are identified as intermediary factors influencing higher-level constructs. At the third level, key brand attributes such as brand clarity, brand exclusivity, and personal brand experience emerge as essential components, significantly shaping customers' emotional and perceptual connections with the brand. At the fourth level, product and service quality, customer-brand relationship, and service quality are recognized as the primary determinants of customer experience. Finally, at the fifth and highest level, after-sales services are identified as the central element in the model, playing a pivotal role in reinforcing customer loyalty and enhancing brand perception.

The proposed model presents a structured hierarchical framework that deciphers the complex interdependencies between various dimensions of customer experience. It provides marketing managers with actionable insights to optimize customer-centric interactions and enhance perceived brand value over the long term. This study not only contributes conceptually by integrating brand theory and brand experience theory in an innovative manner but also advances methodological rigor by employing a hybrid analytical framework, thereby elevating customer experience modeling to a new level. The findings offer valuable implications for future research in smart marketing and brand communication management.