Rethinking Consumer Behavior Through Phygital Episodes

ABSTRACT Consumption unfolds in fused encounters where physical presence and digital mediation co‐occur, which, in turn, reshapes how consumers search, evaluate, purchase, and relate to brands. Consumer behavior research, however, still parses these encounters into channels, touchpoints, and stages that can be studied and managed apart. Such parsing mis‐specifies lived experience, which weakens scholarly inference and managerial guidance. This article responds by introducing the “phygital episode,” a bounded encounter in which physical and digital cues jointly shape a single consumer act, as a core concept for consumer behavior and marketing. Unlike omnichannel logic, which links separable journeys across channels, a phygital‐episode framing treats fusion as the unit of analysis, a shift that yields substantively different and at times opposite managerial prescriptions. A concept with such consequences deserves a focused research agenda, one that strengthens theory, improves measurement, and guides designs that earn trust and safeguard consumer agency during phygital episodes.