Birds of a feather: a normative model of assessing consumers’ satisfaction in a generalized expectation–disconfirmation paradigm

Abstract

Since consumers’ post-purchase behaviors directly indicate the extent of customer satisfaction (CS), these behaviors are relatively objective and can signal consumers’ attitudes toward the purchased product or service. Based on the basic expectation–disconfirmation paradigm, this article proposes a generalized model in evaluating CS by integrating equity, regret, and disappointment. Within this conceptual framework, CS can be assessed in a global manner so that different marketing mixes and strategies may take to meet consumers’ expectations effectively. In addition, by adopting weight and cluster to classify behaviors signaling-defined post-purchase emotional responses, this disappointment–regret–inequity disconfirmation framework and the post-purchase signal model is expected to compromise variables of chosen and forgone options with social exchange comparisons. One major benefit of this proposed post-purchase signal model is that it may partly overcome the shortcomings and reliability issues of self-report method with the measurement of CS in decomposed dimensions based on the occurred purchasing outcomes.