Will Consumers Respond to a Company’s Value Propositions? The Influence of Happiness Motivations on Value Proposition Intensity

Abstract

In a competitive market environment, how to attract and retain customers by offering novel, unique, and fit value propositions could be an important issue for managers and researchers. However, in face of numerous value propositions, customers can only select a few enterprises and continue to interact with them. In service-dominant logic, customers are regarded as operational resources, and their resources and capabilities are also paid more attention to. However, this important logical change has not been clearly reflected in existing relational indicators. In order to make up the inadequacies of previous studies, this paper introduces the concept of value proposition intensity, which refers to the degree of customer response to firms’ value propositions. This study aims to form a more precise understanding of customers’ role in interactive relationships by analyzing their psychological process mechanism, and highlight customers’ subjective initiative characteristics. The research content mainly consists of two parts. One is to analyze the intrinsic dimension of value proposition intensity. Based on the understanding of customers’ learning behaviors in value creation activities, the study suggests that attention, internalization and reflection are the specific paths that influence value proposition intensity, and the definition is given accordingly. The other is to take two kinds of happiness motivations—the hedonic motivation and the self-realization motivation as antecedent variables, and explores the influence of happiness motivations on value proposition intensity. Based on 436 valid questionnaires, the study uses the structural equation model method for empirical testing. All theoretical hypotheses are validated in the hotel context. The results show that attention, internalization and reflection are specific paths that affect value proposition intensity. Both the hedonic motivation and the self-actualization motivation will positively affect customers’ value proposition intensity, and when the two kinds of motivations are both high, customers’ value proposition intensity is also the highest. The theoretical contributions are as follows: First, the research confirms that value proposition intensity is a construct of three dimensions, including attention, internalization and reflection. Attracting customers through value propositions is a constant process. It includes not only providing a fit or unique value propositions to attract customers’ attention, but also establishing emotional connections between customers and value propositions, which aims to promote customers’ psychological process of internalization and reflection furtherly. Second, the definition of value proposition intensity acknowledges the subjective initiative of customers and emphasizes the key significance of customers in experience construction. Third, the research applies happiness motivations to explain customer interaction experiences in the hotel context for the first time. Finally, the study finds that the optimal effect brought by the combination of high-level motivations not only affects life satisfaction, but also applies to customers’ value proposition intensity in the hotel context. The research conclusions can help to promote companies’ procedural management of value proposition communications, change marketing thinking and optimize interactive interface designs. They also have important practical significance for establishing a lasting and stable customer-company relationship.