Consumer Satisfaction with Services: Integrating the Environment Perspective in Services Marketing into the Traditional Disconfirmation Paradigm

Abstract

Russell’s model of affect, with its two dimensions of pleasure and arousal, has been used increasingly to model the experiential nature of services. The outcome variable used in this stream of research is still the original approach/avoidance response behavior as developed by environmental psychologists. This is in contrast to much of the research in consumer behavior, which uses satisfaction to evaluate consumption experiences. In this study, a conceptual model is proposed that integrates the research on the environmental perspective of service experiences with the standard satisfaction model. An experiment was conducted to test a part of this model. It was found that, as hypothesized, confirmation/disconfirmation has a direct and positive effect on pleasure, and both, in turn, have direct and positive effects on satisfaction. The hypothesized role of arousal could not be confirmed.