Customer Emotions Research Articles

The One Thing You Need to Change Is Emotions: The Effect of Multi-Sensory Marketing on Consumer Behavior

Retailers are increasingly aware of the importance of store atmosphere on consumers’ emotions. The results of four experimental studies demonstrate that the sensory cues by which customers sense products and the amount of (in)congruency among the sensory stimuli of the products affect consumers’ emotions, willingness to purchase, and experience. In the presence of moderators such as colors, jingles, prices, and scent imagery, when facing sensory-rich experiential products (e.g., juice, coffee, hamburger, soda) with different sensory cues, consumers’ emotions, willingness to purchase, and experience depend on affective primacy and sensory congruency. The results (1) facilitate an improved consideration of the role of the interaction of sensory cues on customer emotions, (2) have consequences for outcomes linked with sensory congruency and affective primacy, and (3) help clarify possible incoherence in preceding studies on cross-modal outcomes in the setting of multi-sensory marketing.

Behavioural consequences of verbally expressed and unexpressed customer rage emotions

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to distinguish those emotions which customers express verbally during a failed remote service encounter from those which they do not. The study further attempts to investigate the post-consumption customer behaviour of verbally expressed and unexpressed negative customer emotions.Design/methodology/approachThe authors used a survey-based research design. The hypotheses were tested through the “partial least squared structural equation modelling” method.FindingsThis study shows that in a failed remote service encounter, customers verbally express retaliatory rage emotions, such as anger and rage. At the same time, they are able to suppress rancorous rage emotions, such as disgust and contempt and do not express them verbally. The authors demonstrate that after emotions are verbally expressed during a failed remote service encounter, they are followed by the post-consumption behaviours of negative word of mouth and revenge; when emotions are not expressed verbally during a failed service encounter, they are followed up by exit behaviour.Research limitations/implicationsThe effects of variables, such as switching costs and individual and situational factors, can be investigated in the model. Future studies can also explore the role of organizational interventions, such as explanation and apology, on negative customer emotions during failed remote service encounters. Their moderating impact on customer behaviour during and after the encounters can be investigated.Practical implicationsThis study has much practical relevance in the post-COVID-19 world, where remote service delivery is becoming the new normal in many sectors. In remote service delivery situations, verbally unexpressed negative emotions can remain undetected; however, they have negative consequences for firms. This study underscores the need to train frontline employees to notice these unexpressed emotions so that service recoveries can be initiated.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the area of dysfunctional customer behaviour and service recovery. The existing literature has not explored whether some negative emotions are expressed during a failed service encounter and then acted upon later, and some emotions are not expressed but acted upon later. This study addresses the problem of firms getting caught unawares when they find customers resorting to undesirable post-consumption behaviour without demonstrating any verbal expressions during the preceding failed service encounters.

Measuring consumer experience at the retail context: development of ConEx scale

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to conceptualize and develop a scale to measure consumer experience at the retail context. Design/methodology/approach: A questionnaire survey was conducted with a sample of 164 undergraduates of one of the state universities in Sri Lanka. Five dimensions of the consumer experience were identified by the exploratory factor analysis conducted with 21 measurement indicators. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted with the five-factor measurement model and resulted in a five-dimensional structure for consumer experience with 14 measurement indicators. Findings: The study concluded that the consumer experience was a multidimensional construct, comprising the dimensions of virtue, equanimous, amusement, rapture, and strange. The multidimensional nature of consumer experience which was explored will help marketers to focus on the areas in which consumer experience enhancement is required and consumer experience strategies also can be designed according to the multidimensional aspects of consumer experience. Originality: The study developed a Consumer Experience scale (ConEx scale) which can be used to examine the consumer experience in the retail context. The multidimensional structure of ConEx also concerns the hedonistic perspective of consumer experience. Implications: The customer experience in retail sector can be addressed through customer emotions. The explored dimensions of customer experience provide important implications for practitioners by offering new ways to explore customer emotions in retail setting. Keywords: Consumer emotions, consumer experience, experience marketing, retailing, ConEx Scale

Investigating the effectiveness of monetary vs. non-monetary compensation on customer repatronage intentions in double deviation

This article examines the effectiveness of monetary and non-monetary service recovery strategies on repatronage intentions in double deviation when the magnitude of service failure is perceived as intense by consumers. The results of this study suggest that the combination of monetary and psychological compensations has the strongest effect on the intentions of the repatron. Furthermore, the delayed payment and apology used alone do not have an impact on the likelihood that a customer will repurchase from a store repeatedly, while immediate payment and promises lead to a significant increase in reparation intentions and to the alleviation of negative customer emotions. Managerial implications and future research are provided.

Eliciting positive emotion through strategic responses to COVID-19 crisis: Evidence from the tourism sector

While social media are effective means of communicating with adverse customer emotions during a crisis, it remains unclear how tourism organisations can respond to pandemic crisis on social media to prevent negative aftermaths. Using a set-theoretical approach, we investigate how COVID-19 response strategies and linguistic cues of responses are intertwined to evoke positive emotions among consumers. This study entails a qualitative content analysis of tourism organisations' COVID-19 announcements and a social media analytics approach that captures consumers’ emotional reactions to these announcements via their Twitter replies. Our results extend some well-established findings in the tourism crisis literature by suggesting that combining innovative response strategy, argument quality, and assertive language can reinforce positive emotions during the COVID-19 crisis. Taking organisational characteristics into consideration, we suggest that young established hotels utilise innovative response strategies, whereas retrenchment response strategies for all types of restaurants should be avoided during the COVID-19 crisis.

What Raises Purchase Intention of Customers? An Extension in Perspective of Nostalgic Marketing

Emotions are considered as the real inner perception of a person. Emotions can never be ignored or completely eliminated from one’s life. The point of emotion like nostalgia has immense importance in our social life and the concept of nostalgia has a great shift from organizational environment to expanding marketing world. This research aimed to determine the purchase intention as outcome of nostalgic emotions of customers. This study finds the mediating effect of attachment and attitude in between nostalgic emotions and purchase intention. The data for this research was collected from the customers of Toyota and Honda motors located in two metropolitan cities of Pakistan (i.e Karachi and Lahore). The research has used non-probability sampling technique and cross-sectional research design was adopted. Furthermore, the adopted and modified questionnaire was used as survey instrument. The statistical outcomes were drawn from robust statistical technique, covariance-based structural equation modelling (CB-SEM). The results show that nostalgic emotion has positive and significant effect on purchase intention of customers. Moreover, mediating effect of attitude and attachment was confirmed in between nostalgic emotion and purchase intention. Consequently, this study confirmed that organizations should work on customer attitude and attachment which are the possible causes of nostalgic emotion, it may sufficiently increases customers’ purchase intention.

The Effect of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Relationship Marketing and Shariah Compliance on Customer Loyalty with Customer Emotional Response As Intervening


 
 
 
 This study aims to determine how strong the influence of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Relationship Marketing and Shariah Compliance on Customer Loyalty with Customer Emotional Response as an intervening variable. This research uses quantitative methods by processing primary data obtained through distributing questionnaires to people who are customers of Bank Muamalat Indonesia. The sample taken was 50 respondents using purposive sampling technique, then the results obtained were processed with SPSS version 22. The analysis used included descriptive statistical tests, instrument tests, classical assumption tests, model accuracy tests, hypothesis tests and path analysis. Based on the results of the test, the results obtained: CSR has a significant positive effect on customer emotional response. Marketing relations have a significant positive effect on customer emotional responses. Shariah compliance has no significant negative effect on customer emotional response. CSR has a significant positive effect on loyalty. Relationship marketing has no significant positive effect on loyalty. Shariah compliance has no significant negative effect on loyalty. Customer emotional response has a significant positive effect on loyalty. Customer emotional response is able to mediate CSR on loyalty. Customer emotional response is not able to mediate relationship marketing and shariah compliance with loyalty.
 
 
 

The Effects of Perceived Environmental Clues of Bakery Cafés on Customer Emotional Response and Relationship Continuation Intention: Focused on the PAD scale

The Effects of Perceived Environmental Clues of Bakery Cafés on Customer Emotional Response and Relationship Continuation Intention: Focused on the PAD scale

Gyms’ indoor environmental quality and customer emotion: the mediating roles of perceived service quality and perceived psychological safety

ABSTRACT Gym clubs not only play the role of a fitness place for physical exercise, but also serve as a social place that provides enjoyment. This study aims to investigate the relationship between gyms’ indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and customer emotion with the mediating roles of perceived service quality and perceived psychological safety. Using a large sample data of 888 gym customers in Vietnam, results of structural equation modelling reveal a positive relationship between gyms’ IEQ and customer emotion. Furthermore, perceived service quality and perceived psychological safety positively mediate this relationship. Perceived psychological safety also appears to have a mediating effect on the perceived service quality-customer emotion association. These findings provide insights for gyms’ administrators and managers to better understand different elements of IEQ and the role of service quality. Based on this understanding, they can improve their gyms’ IEQ to generate positive customer perception and emotion.

Customer emotions when making an online purchase decision: Results of neuromarketing experiments

Customer emotions when making an online purchase decision: Results of neuromarketing experiments

Customer emotion research in hospitality and tourism: conceptualization, measurements, antecedents and consequences

PurposeTo clarify inconsistencies in the emotion elicitation process and to suggest avenues for advancing emotion research, this study aims to conduct a systematic review of emotion research in the subject area of hospitality and tourism management.Design/methodology/approachThis study analyzes 178 emotion-related articles published in 37 journals from 2004–2019 in the context of hospitality and tourism, providing a systematic synthesis of publication outlets and trajectories, research settings, the conceptualization of emotion, emotion measurement, classifications of antecedents and consequences.FindingsRegarding the elicitation of emotions, many studies ignore the developments in emotion research in the mainstream discipline and still consider external stimuli as the direct causes of emotion. Numerous studies conceptualize customer emotion as positive or negative, which overlooks the nuances between discrete emotions with the same valence. Additionally, emotion scales are largely borrowed from psychology without considering the specific characteristics of the hospitality and tourism context. Methodologically, most studies take a single-measure lens with either a self-report, physiological or expression behavior measure.Research limitations/implicationsThe analysis of the literature highlights three main areas for future emotion studies in the hospitality and tourism context.Originality/valuePrevious reviews are narrative and only address specific areas of interest, rendering them incapable of explaining how a systematic literature identification process was conducted. The present systematic review is among the first to provide an overview of emotion studies in hospitality and tourism over a 15-year period. By drawing insights from appraisal theories of emotions, this review addresses common misunderstandings concerning the emotion elicitation process in the current hospitality and tourism literature.

The psychology of frustration: Appraisals, outcomes, and service recovery

AbstractThis study fills a gap in the consumer emotions literature regarding customer frustration in a customer service setting. Most research on customer emotions has examined anger, happiness or affect in general, largely ignoring the particularities of frustration. Consistent with appraisal theory, we use five experiments to explore the different appraisal dimensions that define frustration and its relation to customer loyalty and satisfaction. Contrary to common belief, we show that frustration is not simply the result of goal‐blocking, but rather of a more complex combination of appraisals which differentiate it from anger and lead to distinct effects on satisfaction and loyalty. We also examine how the effects of frustration on loyalty and satisfaction are mitigated by service recovery in a further experiment and an event reconstructive method. Our results test appraisal theory, inform theory on customer emotions and have important implications for our understanding of customer satisfaction and loyalty following frustrating customer service encounters.

How India's food-tech companies are mining customer emotions from tweets

Purpose This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies. Design/methodology/approach This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context. Findings This research paper performs a sentiment analysis on the tweets of three food delivery app companies operating in India – UberEats, Zomato, and Swiggy. Most of the incoming tweets from customers concerned ordering and the delivery tracking experience, as well as the quality of the food. The public nature of Twitter means data about competitors can be analyzed to carve out a competitive advantage. Leaders and managers are therefore advised to create a strategy for social media-based competitor monitoring and competitor analysis, and to boost the opportunities for customers to experience positive emotions when interacting with the company on Twitter. Originality/value The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Customer’s spontaneous facial expression recognition

<span lang="EN-US">In the field of consumer science, customer facial expression is often categorized either as negative or positive. Customer who portrays negative emotion to a specific product mostly means they reject the product while a customer with positive emotion is more likely to purchase the product. To observe customer emotion, many researchers have studied different perspectives and methodologies to obtain high accuracy results. Conventional neural network (CNN) is used to recognize customer spontaneous facial expressions. This paper aims to recognize customer spontaneous expressions while the customer observed certain products. We have developed a customer service system using a CNN that is trained to detect three types of facial expression, i.e. happy, sad, and neutral. Facial features are extracted together with its histogram of gradient and sliding window. The results are then compared with the existing works and it shows an achievement of 82.9% success rate on average.</span>

It’s part of the job: How webcare agents regulate their emotions during service interactions on Facebook and Twitter

The current study investigates which strategies webcare agents employ to regulate their own emotions when interacting with customers through Facebook and Twitter. Gaining a better understanding of this is important, since (1) customers rely on their emotions when determining how satisfied they are with a service provider and (2) employees can only effectively influence customer emotions if they are able to keep their own emotions in check. By analyzing ‘talk about emotion’ from 17 semi-structured interviews with Dutch webcare agents, we discovered that they use a wide range of emotion regulation strategies (ERS), of which reappraisal is the most commonly mentioned one. An analysis of the use of first-person pronoun ‘I’, fourth-person pronoun ‘you’ and exclusive ‘we’ suggests that the implementation of emotion regulation strategies is supported by the professional role that webcare agents construct for themselves. Results show that webcare agents are generally not influenced by negative emotions, which they see as an inherent part of their job, arising from circumstances that fall outside their sphere of influence. In laying bare the emotion regulation process in the challenging context of webcare, the insights in this article may support webcare agents and their managers in developing a clear perspective on the role requirements and constraints.

Customer-brand disidentification: Conceptualization, scale development and validation

Research suggests that customer-brand disidentification is a pertinent source for the breakdown of consumer-brand relationships and a reason why consumers turn against brands. However, practical and theoretical interest in the study of customer-brand disidentification has been hindered by the absence of a reliable scale with confirmed predictive validity. As a result, the purpose of this study is to develop, operationalize, and test a measure of customer-brand disidentification based on a theoretically valid definition. Drawing on data from six samples, as well as a thorough literature review, the authors develop and validate a scale for measuring customer-brand disidentification. Furthermore, via the application of a nomological net, the authors reveal that customer-brand disidentification is predicated on negative customer emotions after being violated by a brand in a contract breach. Various consumer-based outcomes including patronage reduction and negative word of mouth are found to be consequences of customer-brand disidentification.

Combining rough set theory and support vector regression to the sustainable form design of hybrid electric vehicle

With the popularity of cleaner production and sustainable concepts, hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) has become the most popular alternative after fuel vehicles. Hybrid electric technology reduces air pollution and makes up for the shortcomings of battery life. When customers purchase HEVs, except for considering mechanical properties, Kansei consensus has become a key factor influencing communication between manufacturers and customers. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the mapping relationship between customer visual sensibility and HEV shape design based on Kansei engineering. First of all, the morphological analysis method deconstructs the appearance of HEV and establishes a Likert scale between it and representative perceptual appeal. Secondly, the attribute reduction algorithm in rough set theory is used to identify the key HEV patterns that have an important impact on customer satisfaction. Finally, support vector regression is used to establish a mapping model between customer Kansei and key morphological characteristics of HEV, and the optimal product design combined with the highest Kansei value is obtained. Taking modern emotional as an example, the mapping relationship between product design features and Kansei quality is established. It is found that the optimal emotion of customers could be obtained by selecting hub type seven, side windows type six, grill type three, front doors type three, and headlights type eight in the morphological deconstruction table. The research results enable designers to accurately grasp the customers’ emotional cognition of HEV styling and reinterpret the future HEV body styling, thereby improving customers’ purchase desire and satisfaction.

Effect of Sensory Experience on Customer Word-of-mouth Intention, Considering the Roles of Customer Emotions, Satisfaction, and Loyalty

Although word-of-mouth (WOM) intention has been studied as an outcome variable of some constructs such as loyalty, satisfaction, and trust in retail businesses but less attention has been given to the investigating the effect of sensory experience on customer WOM intention. Since studying concurrently the effects of sensory experience on customer emotions and customer WOM intention in retail chain stores are rare, the purpose of this paper is to study how customer sensory experience affect customer WOM intention in retail chain stores, considering the mediating role of customer emotions. For this purpose, 306 valid questionnaires were collected and analyzed from customers of one of the largest and oldest retail chain stores in Iran (ETKA chain stores). The proposed conceptual model of this research is developed on the basis of S-O-R model. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and multiple regression analysis used to examine the conceptual model of research. This model has been tested using the Partial Least Squares (PLS) approach by SmartPLS software. The results demonstrate that customer sensory experience directly and significantly affects customer emotions. It was also found that the direct effect of customer sensory experience on customer WOM intention is not very considerable but customer sensory experience indirectly affects customer WOM intention through customer emotions, satisfaction, and loyalty. In addition, regression analysis demonstrates that among the five sensory experiences (taste, touch, sight, sound, and smell), taste has the most effect on customer positive emotions. After taste experience, touch, sight, and sound have the most effect on customer positive emotions, respectively. Similarly, it was found that taste and touch experiences have negative and significant effect on customer negative emotions, and the effect of taste experience is stronger than the effect of touch experience.

Relationship Between Customer Experience and Emotional Attachment to the Brand and Behavioral Intentions in Upscale Restaurant Services: Moderating Effect of Brand Personality

Relationship Between Customer Experience and Emotional Attachment to the Brand and Behavioral Intentions in Upscale Restaurant Services: Moderating Effect of Brand Personality

베이커리를 활용한 식공간 연출이 고객감정과 재방문의도에 미치는 영향

This purpose of this study is to verify the effect of bakery-based food space design on customer emotions and revisit intention. Food space design was divided into food styling and dining space desing, and customer emotions and revisit intention were composed of a single factor. To achieve the goal, a survey was conducted on customers who purchased bakeries at hotels and restaurants. The survey was conducted from 1 May 2020 to 1 June 2020 using the Google Online Questionnaire. 293 collected questionnaires were used for statistical analysis. The results of the hypothesis are as follows: (1) Food styling and dining space design have positive effect on customer emotions. (2) Dining space design and customer emotions have positive effect on revisit intention. (3) Food styling and dining space design have on the revisit intention by mediating customer emotions. The results of this study theoretical and practical implications for the marketing strategy of restaurant business.