Consumer satisfaction attribute mapping in hospitality industry through ZMET

Abstract

The paper focuses on understanding brand awareness of consumers from an embedded cognitive state. Consumer's decision making for a brand mainly results from both conscious and non-conscious experiences that a consumer is been exposed to. Consumers preserve these brand knowledge and awareness in a non-conscious level of their mind. Marketers depend upon use of multi-sensory metaphors to bring out that digged-in knowledge. The researcher introduces ZMET as a method to elicitate hidden understanding about a consumer's decision making process by stimulating various human senses and understanding about the attributes that ultimately contributes in consumer decision making. The research would throw light on a qualitative example considering a hospitality industry by identifying the hidden metaphors that contribute in understanding the consumer's satisfaction for experiencing a particular service. This paper concludes with implications mainly for marketers so that they could better identify the decision making factors for consumers in the hospitality industry.