دانلود رایگان مقاله تجربه مصرف کننده: تاثیر تلاش عرضه کننده و مصرف کننده بر رضایت مشتری

abstract

Existing research on experiential offers often examines the impact of such offers on consumers’ evaluations (e.g., customer satisfaction). Yet existing research has neglected that experiential offers typically involve effort from both the supplier and the consumer – and neglected that effort can influence evaluations. To address this gap, the present study examines the impact of supplier effort and the consumer's own effort on the consumer's evaluation of experiential offers in terms of customer satisfaction. Two experiments, comprising two different experiential offers, were carried out. In both experiments, supplier effort (low vs. high) and consumer effort (low vs. high) were manipulated. Customer satisfaction was the dependent variable. The results show that high supplier effort boosts customer satisfaction, and that the effects of consumer effort are either absent or indirect with a negative impact. Moreover, the results indicate that a supplier effort-consumer effort gap (i.e., the consumer perceives that the supplier has expended more effort than the consumer) contributes positively to customer satisfaction.

5.4. Limitations and suggestions for further research

The effort constructs (for both supplier effort and consumer effort) were conceptualized and measured in general terms, thus no specific distinctions between physical and cognitive effort were made. As already indicated, several authors assume that physical and cognitive effort can be subsumed under the same and general effort construct (Eisenberger, 1992; Schmidt et al., 2012). Yet studies specifically on physical effort suggest that it has an impact on cardiovascular and neuromuscular activities (Youngstedt et al., 1993), and on information processing activities (Dietrich and Sparling, 2004; Smit et al., 2005), of the type that cognitive effort may not have. It also seems clear that physical effort in leisure activities (e.g., exercise) produce substantial positive effects such as better health, better mood, higher self-esteem, and higher life satisfaction (Fox, 1999; Rejeski and Mihalko, 2001). Such aspects may influence consequences of physical effort in consumer settings so that its impact on other variables will not be the same as for cognitive effort. Indeed, our findings (in terms of the potency differences for consumer effort between the two experiments) suggest that general items for measuring consumer effort has the potential to produce different results (in terms of both direct and indirect impact on other variables) depending on what type of effort they are employed to capture. Further research, then, may benefit if cognitive and physical effort are dealt with as discrete effort variables. In addition, as for the distinction between supplier effort and consumer effort, it is possible that the role-play scenario approaches per se contributed to making supplier effort a more causally potent factor than consumer effort, in the sense that one's own effort may be harder to simulate in a role play. Additional research, such as field studies, is needed to come to terms with this aspect. The experiments were also limited to examining the impact of effort(s) on one specific outcome variable, customer satisfaction. Clearly, experiential offers can have an impact on also other outcomes, such as memories (Manthiou et al., 2014) and loyalty (Brakus et al., 2009), and further research is needed to establish the role of effort for such outcomes. Moreover, and with respect to mediating variables, it was found that perceived value and perceived quality mediated the effort-satisfaction association in the case of supplier effort (both experiments), and that they produced negative mediation effects in relation to consumer effort (Experiment 2). Yet other mediating variables are likely to be involved, too. Future research should pay attention to the role of emotions, because effort – both supplier effort and consumer effort – is likely to evoke emotions. Given the ambiguity in the literature on the impact of consumer effort, this type of effort deserves particular attention in emotional terms. The possibility that consumer effort can be both positively and negatively charged indeed calls for approaches allowing for both negative and positive emotions to co-exist (cf. Söderlund and Dahlen, 2010).