eLearning Sessions

After completing this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Describe consumer satisfaction.
2. Identify basic factors that influence satisfaction.
3. Discuss the relationship between needs and satisfaction.
4. Explain how quality and satisfaction are related.
5. Describe the expectancy disconfirmation model and its limitations.
6. Identify different emotions associated with satisfaction.
7. Exemplify different types of satisfaction.
8. Identify the consequences of satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

• Individual post-purchase consumer behavior is of growing concern to marketers as they shift their focus from inducing consumers to purchase products and services to developing profitable long-term relationships with them. Long-term relationships are more likely if marketers concern themselves with how best to satisfy consumers in both the short and long run and in multiple ways.
• This chapter describes that part of wheel of consumption focused on the factors that lead to satisfaction and the outcomes of satisfaction for consumers and marketers.
• Understanding your satisfaction is important to your parents and family, your employer, your educational institution, and the businesses that sell you products, services, experiences, and ideas. As evidence of this concern, the American Consumer Satisfaction Index compiled at the University of Michigan comprehensively track customer satisfaction by industry sector and by U.S. governmental department. You can visit their website.

www.bus.umich.edu/research/nqrc

• Consumption experiences evoke in participants a range of emotions from pleasure to reassurance. Emotional extremes, including delight and distress, also might accompany satisfaction with consumption experiences like skydiving or body piercing. By contrast, when consumers are asked about their satisfaction with a favorite brand of toothpaste, they may be satisfied and brand loyal, but most often their response doesn't include much emotion. Often consumer satisfaction reflects a basically neutral emotional state and little cognition as well. Even with a high involvement product such as an automobile, a segment of owners report moderately high levels of satisfaction devoid of strong feelings. Their experience of automobiles is a more cognitive evaluation.
• Satisfaction is also connected to the emotions that accompany purchase outcomes and related events. We will stress the hybrid emotion-cognition nature of satisfaction and the interplay between emotional and cognitive assessments.

1. What is Satisfaction?
• The definition of consumer satisfaction that we will use in this chapter incorporates the emotion-cognition characteristic of this judgment. Satisfaction is a judgment of a pleasurable level of consumption-related fulfillment, including levels of underfulfillment and overfulfillment. A few comments are important in explaining this definition.
• First, consumers can make satisfaction judgments with respect to any or all of the aspects or stages of the product and service experience. For example, in the context of a computer purchase, we could measure satisfaction associated with the purchase phase, or any portion or all of the consumption phase (e.g., the life of the computer). In addition, we could measure satisfaction on any or all of the features of the computer (speed, software, and service, for example), or stages and aspects of the purchase decision (salesperson, negotiations, delivery, paperwork, etc.). Because consumers make judgments about their satisfaction based on a variety of product and service aspects and events, each become a potential point of differentiation for a marketing offering.
• Nevertheless, it is a mistake to assume that all these judgments sum to an overall level. Satisfaction is more complex than that. Consumer Chronicles 17.1 describes one consumer's river-rafting experience. This story reflects an array of both and positive emotions, and it suggests satisfaction emerges across the service or product experience.

Satisfaction With the River-Rafting Experience is Complex (50.0K)

• Consumer research in service environments like banks and hotels also suggests that if bad service is followed by effective service recovery, customers may be more satisfied overall than if they had not experienced bad service in the first place. Apologies and gifts improve customer satisfaction.
• A second thing to observe about the definition of satisfaction is that it focuses on fulfillment. Fulfillment comes in different varieties. For example, we may feel fulfilled or satisfied with the removal of a negative state (for example, repair of a computer hardware problem that prevents us from running software). Finally, we can experience satisfaction when a product or service experience gives greater pleasure than anticipated in a given situation even though it does not exactly fill us up (i.e., under-fulfillment). For example, a young child dreading a doctor visit may express satisfaction after the visit because "it wasn't so bad."
• A third thing to observe about this definition is that satisfaction is an internal state. This means that accounts of satisfaction must highlight the meanings that operate in the customer's field of awareness. This is very important to emphasize. Judgments on satisfaction vary, and different customers make different satisfaction judgments about the same level of performance. It's partly because satisfaction is so variable that marketers tailor products and services to particular segments of consumers.
• Finally, although satisfaction is an internal state, it is also social. Marketers need to be savvy about how individual judgments express a broader system of cultural values, meanings, beliefs, emotions, group relationships and conflicts. The satisfaction of household or buying group members often contributes to an individual consumer's satisfaction.
• Cross-cultural marketers should remember that the ideal of customer satisfaction is not a universal. Consumers in transitional and developing countries may not have learned to concern themselves so much with individual satisfaction as those in developed consumer cultures. Consumer satisfaction is learned as part of socialization in consumer culture.
2. What is Dissatisfaction?
• We can simply define dissatisfaction as an unpleasant level of consumption-related fulfillment. At the same time that this definition makes sense, keep in mind that factors that contribute to higher levels of satisfaction may sometimes differ from factors that contribute to higher levels of dissatisfaction. Let's take a simple example. Consumers at a concert are not likely to report being more satisfied because they did not have to wait in line for tickets, but they are quite likely to report being more dissatisfied if they had to wait in line. Although a particular product attribute or service dimension may affect both satisfaction and dissatisfaction, there are differences in what drives them.

1. How are Performance and Satisfaction Related?
• Many managers believe that product performance or service quality paves the road to satisfaction. Mission statements, company slogans and promotional materials often claim quality as an ideal and assert a close relationship between quality and satisfaction.
• As a result of the belief in the performance-satisfaction link, global management consultant firms from Mexico to Malaysia derive significant revenues from conducting quality and satisfaction studies for their corporate clients. Post-purchase research accounts for one-third of revenues of the largest U.S. market research firms and strong annual growth is reported.
• Despite the fact that service and/or product quality is a frequent organizational goal, a single managerially useful meaning of quality and performance eludes us. Manufactures and consumers don't necessarily agree about product and service quality. For example, a Fortune Survey of chief executive officers of the largest U.S. companies revealed that 60% of these officers believed that "quality is better today" while only 13% believed quality was declining. A large-scale consumer survey conducted during that same period revealed that 49% of the respondents believed quality was declining, and 59% believed it would continue to decline. This finding emphasizes two points: there is no such thing as objective quality (judgments are always based on someone's perceptions), and managers interested in customer satisfaction need to find out how customers (who buy the product or service) perceive quality. Nevertheless, looking across many descriptions of quality, we can conclude that perceived quality involves preferences, is based on comparative standards, differs among customers and situations, and resides in the use or consumption of the product or service. Moreover, quality has both cognitive (thinking) and affective (emotional) aspects.
• Perceived quality is an important predictor of customer satisfaction. Several studies support the causal chain that suggests quality => satisfaction => purchase intention. Although not absolute, there is a relationship between quality (product performance) and customer satisfaction.
• The problem is for each organization to decide how the consumer perceives quality and what features or characteristics consumers use in judging quality. Many lists of features have been developed. Eight dimensions of quality have been proposed, including features, performance, reliability, conformance, durability, serviceability, aesthetics, and perceived quality. Some argue for a product category specific approach to assessing quality. For example, research on 33 food categories revealed five quality dimensions: rich/flavor, natural taste, fresh taste, good aroma, and appetizing looks.
• Researchers have not been especially successful in developing a universal set of quality criteria. For example, the SERVQUAL scale was devised to measure service quality. The scale was first published in 1988 and has undergone numerous revisions. It contains 21 perception items that are distributed through five service quality dimensions: reliability, empathy, tangibles, responsiveness, and assurance. It also contains expectation items.
• In spite of refinements, SERQUAL is difficult and perhaps misleading to employ across all service industries. For example, concepts that SERVQUAL measures, such as employee responsiveness or service reliability, mean different things between service industries. That is to say they do not merely differ in importance to customers across industries. The manager of a bank, airline, HMO, or dry cleaning establishment (to name a few) needs to know exactly, behaviorally, what responsiveness and reliability means in the industry, for the customers. Companies need to deliver the elements of service relevant to their customers in their industry.
• In addition to between industry variations in performance dimensions, there is a great deal of variation within and between consumer segments and cultures on what quality means.
• The basic goal for developing a performance or quality standard is to communicate business performance in clear operational and perceptual terms. Measures need to reflect customer-defined standards, but also be actionable for management. In general, to develop a performance standard that's relevant for the product or service and the customers served, a company needs to link general concepts to specific behaviors and actions managers can take to affect customer perceptions of quality.
• Although we have stated that a relationship between satisfaction and purchase intention exists, we have not yet discussed it. The relationship is complex. For some shopping and convenience goods, satisfaction and repurchase intentions may be closely related. However, if consumers do not distinguish between brands, satisfaction may not predict repurchase intention all that well. Further, sometimes consumers have especially satisfying consumption experiences with products, services and constellations of both (such as a vacation) that they have no intention of repurchasing. This may happen for a variety of reasons including a belief that the experience can never be repeated, a desire to retain the sacred status of the experience, or a belief that other "once in a lifetime experiences" await them.
• Finally, dissatisfying events during a consumption episode can sometimes lead consumers to repurchase. We touched on this idea when we indicated how a global satisfaction judgment might emerge from a rafting trip on which a lot of "bad" things happened.
2. How are Employee and Customer Satisfaction Related?
• Corporate slogans and mission statements sometimes link customer satisfaction to employee satisfaction. Mounting evidence suggests there is a relationship. While the effect may be most pronounced in service industries where satisfaction with contact employees is vital to overall customer satisfaction, there are numerous examples of how non-service industry employees contribute to performance and customer satisfaction.
• Although it seems simple and obvious to say employee satisfaction is linked to customer satisfaction, translating knowledge of that link into managerial action is not so easy. An interesting study employed the Critical Incident Technique to look at service encounters from both the customer's and the employee's perspectives. The critical incident technique is a systematic procedure for recording events and behaviors observed to lead to success or failure on specific tasks. Respondents are asked about specific events and their accounts of these events are content analyzed. The authors found that at least for routine service transactions, employees and customers had shared notions of the sources of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, by examining employee reports of episodes of customer dissatisfaction several implications for management become apparent.
• One implication is that the customer is NOT always right and doesn't always behave in acceptable ways. To have happy employees, who make happy customers, managers need to acknowledge this. Employees need appropriate coping problem solving skills to handle difficult customers, situations and their own personal feelings.
• A second implication is that contact employees generally want to provide good service and are proud of their ability to do this. Employees express frustration when, for some, reason they believe they cannot recover from a service failure or adjust the system to accommodate a customer need. Poorly designed systems or procedures, cumbersome bureaucracy, too many rules, and the lack of authority to do anything are often to blame.
3. How are Choice and Satisfaction Related?
• Although in most situations, consumers use features of product or service choice to form satisfaction judgments, in other cases the features that drive choice and satisfaction may differ, or they may differ in importance to consumers. Exhibit 17.1 diagrams the distinction between product and service choice criteria and drivers of satisfaction.

Drivers of Choice and Satisfaction (50.0K)

• Research on adventure tourism activities like river rafting illustrates differences between choice and criterion and satisfaction drivers. Consumers choose rafting companies in terms of such things as amenities offered, rivers accessed, length of trip, and safety claims. But variation in performance on these dimensions has relatively little to do with customer satisfaction. Satisfaction is instead driven by feelings of harmony with nature, connection to a community of adventurers, and personal growth experiences that result from the consumption experience, not the pre-purchase choice process.
• There are a lot of possible reasons why choice criterion may differ from satisfaction drivers. One reason is that consumers have trouble foreseeing the possible problems and benefits of consumption. For complex, extended, or infrequently purchased services like an expensive tourist adventure, we might expect the discrepancy between choice and satisfaction drivers to be pronounced. Similarly for complex, infrequently purchased high tech products that can be used in numerous ways to attain various goals, research has found discrepancies between choice and drivers.
• A related reason for differences between choice and satisfaction drivers might be that aspects of the consumption situation that directly impact satisfaction and dissatisfaction are unpredictable and hence can't be used as choice criterion. In many situations, post-purchase consumption experience with complex goods and services differs from consumers' predictions.
• A related issue is that consumers' satisfaction judgments focus purchases outcomes, while firms emphasize differences between product or brand attributes in their marketing communications. If a company can distinguish itself from competitors in terms of consumer outcomes, they may be able to more closely align choice criteria and satisfaction drivers. Marketing communications that stresses the outcomes of product use or non-use can be viewed as attempts to align choice and satisfaction drivers.
4. How Do Consumers Judge Satisfaction
• Earlier we observed that satisfaction implies goals or standards that form a basis for comparison. Expectations provide one standard for later judgments of satisfaction. We can define expectations simply as anticipation or predictions of future events. Expectations include predictions of future product performance, and also related hopes, apprehensions, uncertainties and probabilities. Consumer's basic expectation is that the products or services they purchase will fulfil their wants.
• It is appropriate to outline some of the most common models for understanding the relationship between standards and satisfaction. Most research has employed some variant of the Expectancy-Disconfirmation Model of Satisfaction. However, as suggested in our discussion, there is increasing recognition that other kinds of comparative standards such as fairness might also affect judgments of satisfaction.
5. Expectancy-Disconfirmation Model of Satisfaction
• The expectancy-disconfirmation model of satisfaction (EDM) states that disconfirmation of pre-consumption expectations is the key influence on consumer satisfaction. Exhibit 17.2 illustrates the expectancy-disconfirmation framework that we can use to try to understood both how these concepts are related and what this means for management strategy. This model suggests that expectations and disconfirmation operate together to jointly determine satisfaction levels. When performances exceedexpectations, positive disconfirmation occurs and the likelihood of consumer satisfaction is increases. When expectations are not met, negative disconfimration occurs and the likelihood of consumer dissatisfaction increases.

A Simplified Expectancy_Disconfirmation Framework (50.0K)

• Now consider what happens when performance expectations are neutrally confirmed. Not much! Meeting performance expectations is probably not the key to satisfaction. Even delivering as expected when expectations are moderate or high may evoke an emotionally neutral response. Hence, the competitor that positions itself to exceed customer's expectations will likely outperform the firm that merely meets customer expectations.
• What is most important in predicting satisfaction in the EDM model is the subjective disconfirmation felt by the consumer, which may differ from disconfirmation as measured by the firm.
• To more formally understand the EDM model we need to describe assimilation effects and contrast effects. Assimilation effects imply that individuals are reluctant to acknowledge discrepancies from a previously held position. Hence, individuals will explain away (rationalize) apparent discrepancies. In the context of satisfaction this implies that repeat consumers may minimize or rationalize away discrepancies from expectations with a subjective report that the product is "exactly as expected" or "better than expected." Contrast effects have been described as the tendency to exaggerate differences, making them larger than reality. Keep in mind that disconfirmation may be of two sorts-- negative (worse than expected) or positive (better than expected). In both cases of disconfirmation there may be a tendency to exaggerate discrepancies (e.g., contrast effects).
• Finally, we need to mention the relationship between expectations and disconfirmation. One possible relationship that has been observed is a negative one (known as a ceiling-floor effect). In this case, very high expectations (ceiling) are more likely to result in negative disconfirmation, and very low expectations (floor) are more likely to result in positive disconfirmation. People reflect a belief in this relationship when they say, "I don't want to get my hopes too high because then I'm sure to be disappointed." Because of these effects, firms may sometimes benefit from downplaying consumer expectations.
• Many internal and external factors influence the expectations that consumers bring to their satisfaction judgments. Some important sources of expectations include memories of past experiences (influenced by such memory factors as ease and vividness of recall), word-of-mouth communications such as consumer-maintained websites, explicit and implicit promises made by the organization through promotional and other media, product cues, and third-party information.
• Our culture is also an important source of expectations. Research on satisfaction with technological products finds it relates to American cultural myths linking technology to human perfection, intelligence, and skill. Violations of cultural expectations are an under-studied source of consumer anger, frustration, and dissatisfaction. Sometimes cultural expectations will become evident in a different cultural setting.
• Expectations may vary in abstractness, complexity, and accessibility. When expectations are abstract or ill formed, thinking of satisfaction as a direct result of fulfilled expectations (especially initial ones) may not be very useful. In such circumstances, satisfaction derives from providing benefits that were inaccessible to customers or not within their range of expectations.
• Trying to understand and identify consumers' expectations can be challenging. Sources of expectations differ and sometimes consumers are only aware of their expectations when they are violated. Adding to the complexity, consumers often use multiple levels of expectations or standards.
• In some cases, the comparison case or object is not known at the time of purchase, but is formulated during or following the consumption experience and then used in determining level of satisfaction. Consider especially trial of novel products or services. Free food samples offered in grocery stores offer a familiar example. Sometimes, consumers will try a product in a supermarket with few active expectations of what it will be like. That is not to say they don't have passive expectations. Moreover, from a variety of cues such as response of other consumers, color, apparent texture, visible packaging and so on, consumers may passively organize some ideas about what to expect.
• Marketers often attempt to identify comparison objects for consumers in a way to make their products or services seem desirable or superior.
• In addition to vague or unknown expectations, multiple levels of expectations, and passive expectations, consumers' expectations change over time. With some service encounters (and probably with many consumers' product experiences as well), consumers update their expectations throughout the consumption process. Although this seems intuitively obvious there is actually very little understanding of how this works. In particular, it's unclear how these updated expectations are related to observed performance up to that point and how updated expectations influence satisfaction. There is some very preliminary work that suggests the updated expectations will be most influential in your satisfaction judgment, but more research to understand problems of this sort is needed.
• The preceding helps to emphasize a very important point - satisfaction is a process extending across the entire consumption experience.Studying consumer-product interactions following purchase is fundamental to understanding satisfaction. When researchers do this (which by and large they have not), they may find that modeling satisfaction in terms of fulfilled expectations looses its explanatory power.
6. Other Comparative Standards for Judging Satisfaction
• In this section we consider two other possible satisfaction standards: desires and fairness.
• Desires are individuals' goals and desires that might serve as a standard against which to judge satisfaction. In a desires model of satisfaction satisfaction is a function of the consumer's assessment of the degree to which a product meets or exceeds his or her desires, the outcome being called desires congruency. Desires are the levels of products' attributes and benefits that a consumer believes will lead to, or are connected with, higher-level values, such as the terminal values discussed in Chapter 5.
• Some advertisements stress a connection between product use and deeply held consumer desires, but delivering on these desires is hard.
• Most satisfaction research has assumed judgments are a rational and cognitive process of connecting product features to benefits. But consumption desires often spring from less rational and more affective processes - many below the threshold of consciousness. Much more research is needed on the desires approach to understanding satisfaction.
• An interesting, on-going, multi-cultural research project attempts to look at the nature of consumer desire using a range of projective research techniques more appropriate to tapping the irrational bases of satisfaction. Good Practice 17.4 illustrates some of the different ways these researchers have used to attempt to understand what consumers desire.

Some Ways of Asking About Consumer Desires (50.0K)

• Perceptions of fairness affect consumers' satisfaction. When consumers feel they've been exposed to unfair or deceptive pricing practices, they may seek reparation by switching brands or firms, for example. Beyond seeking reparation, consumers may also seek to punish marketers for unfair treatment.
• The fairness concept is built into Homans' rule of justice, which proclaims parties' rewards in exchanges with others should be proportional to their investments (or losses). In judging fairness, consumers compare their outcomes to their investments (or losses), but they also compare their outcomes to the perceived outcomes of other individuals or groups. Perceived inequity results in feelings of distress.
• Exhibit 17.3 illustrates the relationship between three dimensions of fairness and satisfaction/dissatisfaction. Of the research in marketing focused on fairness, nearly all has considered only distributional fairness, or how rewards or outcomes are partitioned among the participants in an exchange.

The Relationship Between Fairness and Satisfaction (50.0K)

• Research both inside and outside marketing settings suggests that two other forms of fairness are also important to satisfaction/dissatisfaction judgments. Procedural fairness refers to the manner in which the outcomes are delivered. Some research indicates that when customers both participate in and influence the outcomes of service delivery, satisfaction increases.
• Interactional fairness refers to how the customer is treated by the marketer. Level of satisfaction and likelihood of complaint behavior depend on whether consumers perceive the outcome following a service failure to be fair, but also depend on interactional justice. This is the degree to which the service provider, whether a Norwegian consumer service or a Singaporean shipping line, provides an explanation, shows empathy and respect, and takes steps to correct service failures promptly.
7. Consumer Attributions and the Satisfaction Process
• When products or services fail, consumers may attempt to understand the reason why. The degree of disappointment and danger felt and also intentions to repurchase and intentions to complain are influenced by how consumers explain the failure.
• Attribution theory was developed in social psychology to understand how individuals find explanations for outcomes or behaviors. Of course, the desire to understand why something happened varies between and within cultures and also between situations. Moreover, there are many situational, cultural, and individual differences in the kinds of explanations consumers give. In this chapter, we focus only on the impact of consumer attributions on the emotions and judgments made by a consumer following a product or service purchase and/or consumption experience.
• Actions that are detrimental to a person, and are perceived by that individual as subject to the discretion of others, generate anger.
• The relationships we have outlined between attributions and anger (dissatisfaction) toward the firm are summarized in Exhibit 17.4.

Consumer Attributions and Feelings of Anger With the Firm (50.0K)

• In this section we have described some of the factors that influence satisfaction. We have summarized what we currently know about the relationship between performance and satisfaction, how employee satisfaction influences customer satisfaction, differences between choice criteria and satisfaction criteria, and several different kinds of comparisons that consumers use in judging satisfaction.

• Attention has recently shifted to the emotional content of satisfaction an especially the way in which satisfaction and emotions vary together in consumption experiences. In some, emotions vary quite a bit over time. This same mixture of emotions and cognition applies to other kinds of purchase processes and consumption experiences, especially experiential (a museum tour, a roller coaster ride) and leisure (watching a movie, attending a ball game) consumption episodes, but to ongoing experiences with consumer durables, as well. Five emotional response modes-contentment, pleasure, delight, relief, and ambivalence-that might all be described as satisfaction.

1. Satisfaction as Contentment
• One common meaning of satisfaction is contentment. The contentment response is characterized by low levels of emotional arousal and may entail disinterest. Contentment is a passive response. Often when we ask consumers how satisfied they are with products or services that they don't think very much about or that they are not very involved with this is the type of satisfaction response we get. What the "satisfied" consumer means is that the performance of the service or product is within expectations and so disconfirmation is neutral. This satisfaction response could also be associated with more high involvement products or services that have stable performance over time.
• Sometimes, experiences with other products or services can lead consumers to change their evaluations from contentment to some other emotional satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
2. Satisfaction as Pleasure
• Sometimes purchase and use of a product "makes one happy." For example, when consumers choose a favorite piece of clothing, have a pleasing sensory experience at a restaurant, play a new CD they just purchased, or just sit behind the wheel of their new automobile, they may have a pleasurable response.
• Product and service firms that consistently deliver very high quality service are likely to evoke a pleasurable response.
• The catalog merchandiser Lands' End prides itself on being this kind of company. Lands' End has an Internet team, serving people who use the Lands' End Live feature on the company's website.

www.landsend.com

• In many cases, sales are closed by human interaction that soothes last minute anxieties and doubts at the point of purchase, and turns cognitive satisfaction into a pleasurable exchange.
3. Satisfaction as Delight
• Occasionally, product or service performance evokes a combination of joy and surprise that has been termed delight. The delight response involves either a positive disconfirmation of expectations or a positive event or outcome that the consumer did not have any expectations about.
• For many complex products and services consumers may have few expectations and, as described earlier, even articulated needs may be quite abstract. In such cases, delight may come from discovering pleasurable surprises (e.g., a useful feature after purchase).
4. Satisfaction as Relief
• Sometimes the removal of a negative state leads to consumer satisfaction. Such a situation evokes a relief response. Whereas consumers seek out feelings of contentment, pleasure, and delight, most do not look for aversive stimuli that can then be eliminated.
• A feeling of relief may come about as a response to unfulfilled negative expectations. Relief can also result from the elimination of a negative state, as with medication, a successful legal defense, a warning instead of a ticket for speeding, and so on.
• Depending on the situation, satisfaction as relief can involve high levels of arousal and involvement. When the marketer believes satisfaction as relief is a response to performance, timing service or product delivery and helping the customer manage expectations become crucial.
5. Satisfaction as Ambivalence
• Consumers in complex societies often deal with conflicting demands, social roles, and cultural values. Even self-concepts involve conflicting aspects or even different selves. Hence, ambivalence response is a common response to various purchase and consumption experiences. We can define consumer ambivalence as the simultaneous or sequential experience of multiple emotional states associated with acquisition and/or consumption processes. This may get high levels of involvement and affective response. Many of our most memorable consumption and life experiences may be best described as evoking mixed emotions. When the marketer believes satisfaction as ambivalence is a response to performance, helping the customer interpret expectations and outcomes, managing assimilation and contrast effects, become crucial.

• In this section we overview four behavioral responses to purchase and consumption experiences. In response to satisfying and/or dissatisfying purchase and consumption experiences consumers may opt to exercise one or more of four options: exit, voice, continued patronage, or "twist: (e.g., resistance). Many different kinds of feelings and beliefs can be expressed in each of these behaviors and each may be more or less active.

1. Exit
• When a consumer has a dissatisfying purchase and consumption experience the most common response is simply not to purchase or use that product or service again. That is, the consumer will exit as a customer of the organization. At a minimum, the dissatisfied consumer may attempt to avoid that product or service, selecting other alternatives whenever they are accessible and feasible. Of course, not all decisions to exit are based on dissatisfaction, and not all dissatisfied consumers exit.
• Sometimes consumers exit because another alternative seems superior, because they are seeking variety or because circumstances or needs have changed and so on. Nevertheless, the average firm is estimated to lose 20 percent of its customers in a given year, mostly due to dissatisfaction. Waiting until dissatisfaction expresses itself as a decision to exit can have a disastrous impact on market share and profits.
• Some consumers will exit or switch (rather than complain) when marketers are heterogeneous (offer lots of different alternatives) and consumers are knowledgeable about alternatives. That is, when consumers perceive they have choices, and don't have to patronize a particular organization, they will switch when they are dissatisfied.
• We might expect that an exit strategy would often be employed with low-involvement or inexpensive products and services. Of course, this "invisible response" to dissatisfaction can gradually erode market share unless the firm makes an effort to uncover the discontent behind this action.
2. Voice
• Voice is highly consequential for marketers. Voice can take several different forms including compliments an organization may receive when it delivers an especially satisfying outcome, complaints to the company about performance failure, negative and positive word-of-mouth with other consumers or consuming organizations, or third party complaints orcompliments. Consumers' complaints and compliments to firms provide valuable feedback, and their interpersonal communications (both positive and negative) strongly impact other consumers' purchases. Loyal customers are most likely to engage in positive word-of-mouth.
• Consumers' interpersonal communications (both positive and negative) strongly impact others' purchases. Unfortunately, customers are more apt to engage in word-of-mouth than to provide feedback.
• Management can use complaints as an important tool. Dissatisfied consumers who do not complain are more likely to discontinue purchase (e.g., exit). By encouraging consumers to complain, and seeking to readdress their problems, management can actually create more satisfied consumers who are more likely to talk favorably about the organization with other consumers. The very act of complaining can enhance ultimate satisfaction not only through initiating redress, but also through its cathartic effects of "getting it off my chest." On the other hand, consumers' negative word-of-mouth communications tend to reinforce or increase their levels of dissatisfaction with the firm. Management should make sure legitimate complaints are handled efficiently and effectively.
• Voice can accompany either exit or continued patronage behavior. Voice varies with culture, market infrastructure (e.g., presence of a complaint channel), the economics of complaining, and consumer psychology. Complaining behavior in the U.S. varies by ethnic group (subculture). Mexican-American consumers are more likely to complain about problems such as delay or non-delivery that other consumers. Puerto Rican cultural norms and values lead them to complain less than other U.S. consumers. Age, income, education, attitudes, interests and personalities have all been used as predictors of complaining behavior. Complainers tend to be younger, have a higher income level, and are less brand-loyal than non-complainers.
• Non-complaining rates vary with different cultures. Cultures with a more fatalistic worldview (belief in fate), those with totalitarian or formerly totalitarian political regimes such as in Eastern Europe, or cultures with a more interdependent orientation may be less likely to complain than those that stress individual agency. Consumers in countries that have not developed market infrastructure to facilitate voice, or where the consuming public is relatively uninformed about consumer rights (hence, unsure what they can expect) may be less likely to complain.
• There are a number of economic reasons that help explain why a consumer would or would not complain. As product or service price declines, so does complaining; it's not worth the cost of complaining. Product importance will increase complaining. The perceived costs and efforts of complaining will depress complaining behavior.
• The problem of fraudulent complaining is a legitimate concern for management, as some consumers will try to improve their outcomes though this method.
• Attributions or causal inferences for product or service failure influence both complaining and complimenting firms and also positive and negative work-of-mouth.
• Perceived psychological costs may hinder dissatisfied, but passive consumers from complaining. For example, complaining may be viewed as confrontational and the consumer may fear being intimidated or berated by the organization.
3. Continued Patronage
• In this section we want to consider the relationship between customer satisfaction and continued patronage or loyalty. Satisfaction is a relatively temporary post-purchase state that reflects how the product or service has fulfilled its purpose. Customer loyalty is a deeply held commitment to rebuy or re-patronize a preferred product or service consistently in the future, despite situational influences and marketing efforts having the potential to cause switching behavior. Thus, loyalty includes both readiness to act (repeat customer) and resistance to alternatives. For firms, loyalty leads to profits, more predictable sales and profits streams, and positive word-of-mouth.
• Customer satisfaction leads to loyalty and continued patronage. Specifically, if a consumer is very loyal and switching costs are high, decreases in satisfaction will not cause switching until some threshold of dissatisfaction is reached.
• Companies should be quite interested in generating and maintaining consumer loyalty, but it's not easy. Although clusters of consumers claim that they "find a good brand and stick with it," this doesn't seem to translate into consistent repurchase rates. While 85 to 95% of automobile customers report they are satisfied, only 30 to 40% return to their previous make.
• Enduring loyalty is a long-term consequence only of some types of customer satisfaction (e.g., pleasure and delight), reinforced by ongoing positive experience and support from other members of a household or buying group or from valued reference groups. If product consumption is closely associated with community membership or identity, loyalty may be stronger.
• Relational strength may lead consumers to ignore competitive alternatives. Consumers may remain loyal even when it is difficult to do so. With low switching costs in competitive markets, the relationship between satisfaction and continued patronage is more fluid. When people are only moderately satisfied with an automobile, they may switch since there are so many brands of cars available. Satisfaction is not enough to guarantee continued patronage.
4. Twist
• Consumers may express themselves through actions other than switching, voice, or loyalty. We use the term twist to refer to these behaviors. Twist refers to positive and negative ways in which consumers restructure meanings, roles, and objects in the marketplace. The consumer reacts to consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction with novel behaviors unanticipated by the offering organization. In general, it seems likely that loyal consumers might be more likely to feel a sense of ownership that translates into positive, voluntary, and often novel behaviors toward the organization. Such behaviors are common for many not-for-profit organizations such as churches or public radio stations that rely on volunteers to answer the phones during annual fund drives.
• Positive twist includes little things such as picking up someone else's litter in the parking lot or rehanging a piece of clothing that some other customer knocked off the rack.
• Alternatively, consumers may reflect their dissatisfaction with a company by engaging in a negative twist, unwanted behaviors or acts of resistance against the company. Sometimes these behaviors take an organized form such as picketing an establishment.
• Until recently, discussions of twist have been limited and focused primarily on collective (organized) actions directed at changes in marketing mix structure and composition. However, there are many forms of twists. We can describe these kinds of consumer resistance along four dimensions. First, consumers can resist as individuals or collectives. Second, consumers can have goals that vary from reformist to radical. Third, tactics of resistance can vary from actions directed at altering the marketing mix (fighting for product safety features, or against ads on television), to actions directed at altering the meaning of products (using products in unintended ways). Fourth, consumers can appropriate marketing institutions and agents as their tools of resistance, try to use non-marketing institutions as agents as their tools of resistance, or try to use non-marketing institutions and agents such as the courts as instruments of change. Most instances of consumer resistance can be described using these four dimensions.
• One well-known example of organized resistance is Adbusters. Adbusters is a quarterly magazine with the twin goals of raising consciousness of commercial excess and evaluating the media awareness and skills of those in the anti-consumerist movement. Adbusters is a collective project with the radical goal of reducing consumerism.

Adbusters Twists Advertising Conventions (50.0K)

• Individual and organized resistance against marketing organizations and marketing practices may be on the increase among Generation Xers, a group that tends to be less materialistic than previous generation and more cynical about marketing.
5. Consumer Satisfaction and Profitability
• Exhibit 17.5 represents the direct effects on profitability of quality, satisfaction, and loyalty. As can be seen in the exhibit, quality has direct effects on both satisfaction and profitability.

Customer Satisfaction and Profits (50.0K)

• Satisfaction has direct effects on profit through its influence on retention. Satisfied consumers are easier to reach with communications, more insulated from competitive overtures, and more willing to increase volume of purchases and tolerate price increases.
• Studies that report on the value of a loyal customer are staggering. For example, Ford Motor Company has estimated the value of a one-point (percent) increase in owner loyalty to be worth $100 million in profit. In addition, loyal customers require less attention and allow firms to weather competitor attacks and budget tactical market moves.