From Customer Satisfaction to Emotions: Alternative Framework to Understand Customer's Post-consumption Behavior

Abstract

The current trend in marketing is to create engaging, extraordinary, and lasting customer experiences. Such experience goes beyond mere customer satisfaction and plays a fundamental role in determining the customers' preferences and purchase decisions. It is not sufficient to achieve customer satisfaction, but to consider its component experiences, intangible elements linked to the emotional value perceived by customers and the emotional and irrational side of customer behavior. The authors hold the view that building an integrated emotional framework to delineate consumers experience will further predict customer post-consumption behavior besides the traditional satisfaction rating. This review starts from literature concerning to customer satisfaction, afterwards from a psychological perspective states reasons why we need to study consumer emotions, and then briefly summarizes the existing empirical researches regarding how emotions affect consumer behavior. Finally, the authors introduce affect taxonomies that could be used for predicting customers' post-consumption behavior instead of customer satisfaction.