Managing Customers: Analyzing the Relationship between Customer Personality, Customer Satisfaction and Willingness to Create WOM

Adnan Butt,Salman Hameed,Meer Suroor,Kashif Mehmood

doi:10.52633/jemi.v3i2.79

Adnan Butt, Salman Hameed + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.52633/jemi.v3i2.79

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Abstract

The impact of personality traits on consumer behaviour is always an important concern for marketing researchers and practitioners. Using the theoretical lens of the OCEAN model, this paper explores the personality attributes as a set of stimuli that facilitate consumers satisfactory buying experience, resulting in a higher willingness to create word of mouth (WOM). The data was collected from consumers of different services through the convenience sampling method. The respondents were approached through different online platforms and data from 303 respondents was obtained through Google forms. 19 responses were found unsuitable for further use, so the remaining 284 appropriate questionnaires were analyzed through structural equation modelling using AMOS23. The study findings suggest that willingness to create WOM has a positive relationship with customer satisfaction, while customer satisfaction can be driven by extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness attributes of consumers’ personalities. However, neuroticism and openness to experience showed an insignificant impact on customer satisfaction. The study findings guide marketing managers to consider the customer personality aspects mentioned in the OCEAN model to enhance customer satisfaction and try to obtain positive WOM from customers. This paper investigates the in-depth knowledge on the practicality of the OCEAN model concerning customer satisfaction coupled with customer willingness to create WOM.

Highlights

The biggest challenge for the service industry players is that their offerings are intangible in nature and cannot be evaluated before consumers experience these services (Ng et al, 2011)
The results show that the first hypothesis, extraversion has a positive impact on consumer satisfaction has been accepted (β=.168; p
The impact generated by Word of Mouth (WOM) has made it important for today’s marketers to remain updated about its theory, power, effect and understanding

Summary

Introduction

The biggest challenge for the service industry players is that their offerings are intangible in nature and cannot be evaluated before consumers experience these services (Ng et al, 2011). The significance of WOM on consumer purchase decisions and retention is well recognized by the industry. A wide range of studies have been conducted to investigate factors that influence consumer willingness to create WOM and one of the most recognized factors is consumer satisfaction. According to Kalinic et al (2020) and Yen and Wang (2020), consumer satisfaction is a vital contributing factor for willingness to create WOM. Service industries capitalize heavily in efforts to achieve consumer satisfaction that reinforces willingness to create WOM, resulting in the long term profitability of the industries (Cheng et al, 2021). The path to consumers’ willingness to create WOM does not begin with satisfaction, but rather with the drivers of satisfaction such as consumer’s personality traits; a key driver of buying behaviour (Smith, 2020; Orji et al, 2017; Sofi & Nika, 2016)

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