Effects of communicating emotions on consumer perceptions of fairness.

详细信息   

• 作者：Lee ; Sooyeon Nikki.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2004
• 导师：Corfman, Kim P.
• 毕业院校：New York University
• 专业：Business Administration, Marketing.
• ISBN：9780496748358
• CBH：3127571
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：6610135
• Pages：162

文摘

Consumers feel badly when their expectations of fairness are violated, even in cases that might not be deemed objectively unfair. These negative emotions tend to be used as relevant information when judging the fairness of the salient object, which may be perceived as responsible for the emotions (e.g., a retailer who charges different prices, or a service provider that treats customers differently). The resulting judgment of unfairness lowers consumer satisfaction with the retailer and may decrease the likelihood of future patronage. In such circumstances, marketers lose customers and may not know why.;In this dissertation, I propose that companies can recoup or preventively maintain these customers by communicating with them, focusing especially on their emotions; this is a novel approach compared to previous research that mainly focused on cognitive determinants of fairness. Specifically, I find that letting consumers communicate their emotions can influence their perceptions of fairness negatively or positively depending on whether the perceiver is observing other's emotions or expressing their own emotions. In addition, I show moderators of these two initial effects: perceived responsibility of the target of expression and perceived similarity between the observed and the observer.;This dissertation contributes to the theoretical understanding of how consumer perceptions of unfairness are formulated, and provides marketers with practical implications concerning what means can effectively and realistically manage fairness perceptions. I provide evidence that communicating emotions determines the fairness perception of consumers under certain boundary conditions, while examining data that track changes in affect during each process in real time. Specifically, the revised theoretical framework posits that communicating emotions moderates how the transaction-specific affect is used as relevant information to determine fairness perceptions. The practical recommendations suggested by this research are the following: it is helpful for marketers (a) to use a third party to solicit emotional expression in order to maintain its beneficial effect on fairness perceptions; and (b) to emphasize dissimilarities between their target audience and the expressers of negative emotions that are available for observation.