APPENDIX B
WHAT DOES MARKETING RESEARCH TELL US ABOUT CONSUMER EMOTIONS?

A number of important studies have been conducted by marketing experts defining the parameters of emotions associated with consumption. Six parameters suggest that evaluation of service by customers is a lot more complex than perhaps many have previously thought.

1. Different industries elicit different emotions. Australian psychologist Michael Edwardson and others have discovered that certain emotions are more likely to be experienced with specific kinds of consumer experiences. For example, automobiles are more likely to create strong, positive feelings of joy and excitement rather than love and nostalgia. When there is a problem, automobiles are more likely to create the strong, negative feelings of frustration and worry rather than anger.¹
   Edwardson himself has mapped the emotional profiles for some thirty service industries. He finds more positive, strong emotions in retailing and restaurants than in banking. In other words, customers are more likely to be emotionally neutral while using banking services than while eating a meal. For this reason, Edwardson recommends that banks work to eliminate the strong, negative feelings that can be associated with banking, such as feelings of powerlessness, anger, anxiety, nervousness, and frustration, rather than focusing on creating strong, positive emotions. Edwardson describes the results of 368 in-depth interviews with consumers, in which over 220 different emotion words were used by the people being interviewed.² The top 10 emotions recalled were as follows:
   see table
   Note where satisfaction appears on this list. It is perhaps more relevant to look at anger, happiness, frustration, annoyance, and disappointment, which, no doubt, are going to be more influential in creating loyal or disloyal customers. Edwardson further points out that you rarely find customers using the word “delight” to describe their consumption experience, even though this is a word popularized by dozens of speakers and authors.³ We believe that businesses need to create happy, enthusiastic, and appreciative customers, i.e., create customers around the emotions that they, in their own terms, remember.252
2. Quality variables all have an emotional component. Five service variables are identified in the SERVQUAL model (developed by service marketing researchers Valerie Zeithaml, A. Parasuraman, and Leonard L. Berry) as being most important to customers when receiving service. The five variables are well known in the customer service field and include tangibles (physical quality), reliability (whether the organization follows through on its promises), responsiveness (how quickly the organization gets back to you), assurance (feeling of confidence), and empathy (caring for the customer).⁴
   The foundation for all five of the SERVQUAL variables, including physical quality, is emotional. For example, a customer can view a sturdy, dependable car that is a good value for the money and not purchase it because there is no “wow” factor. Ted Levitt, at Harvard Business School, puts it this way: “There is no such thing as service industries. There are only industries whose service components are greater or less than those of other industries. Everybody is in service.”⁵253
3. Emotions do not run along a continuum. Emotions do not run along a continuum, according to researchers of customer emotions. This is one of the biggest challenges to the usefulness of the satisfaction/dissatisfaction continuum, a continuum used by most businesses to measure customer reactions. On a continuum scale, it is assumed that the very factors that produce satisfaction will, in their absence, produce dissatisfaction. There are dozens of simple everyday examples that suggest otherwise. For instance, a plane leaving on time generally produces satisfaction while one leaving late normally produces dissatisfaction. But that does not mean that a plane that leaves on time makes me happy, and one that leaves late makes me sad. My sadness or happiness can depend upon my attitude toward the event—or how the service provider handles the delay. A plane that leaves late might make me happy if I happen to arrive late to the airport or if the flight crew makes the delay a pleasant one. And one that leaves late might make me feel secure if the reason for its lateness is that something mechanical has to be fixed or if I want to have more time at the gate talking with a friend before my flight leaves.
4. Emotions matter with advertising, as well. There are two camps about the use of emotions in advertising. One view has it that customers respond with higher purchase intentions when ads provide more information rather than trying to excite customers.⁶
   The other camp takes the exact opposite point of view. It says that feelings are more important for consumer decision making than thinking. Tim Ambler, senior fellow at London Business School, states his point of view: “Must ads be informational? If you are of a cognitive or rational disposition then you will believe that ads are rational and humans are rational and the economy is rational and the choices are rational. Therefore advertising must be about information.”⁷ Ambler argues that this point of view benefits the researcher and not the consumer. In fact, he says this is a myth, and it’s time to put it away. Ambler explains that when ads evoke feelings, they also activate the part of the frontal lobe that is the center for decision making. Therefore, emotional ads make it easier for the customer to link buying decisions to positive feelings.254
5. Emotions are dependent on space and temporal demands. Service encounters that are of short duration are experienced by customers differently from those of long duration. For example, customers have more time to experience emotional states on an international flight that is several hours long than they do going into a bank for five minutes. The more complex the service transaction is, the more opportunity there is for emotions to be experienced. The same is true depending on how physically close the service provider and the customer are. A medical appointment with a gynecologist or proctologist is very different from a luggage porter bringing suitcases to your hotel room.⁸
6. Customer knowledge affects emotional states. Emotions differ depending on the knowledge the customer brings to the service experience. For example, when customers need car servicing or repair and they feel technically challenged by what they are told, fairness emerges as the most important emotion that will predict how customers evaluate the service they receive. Otherwise, empathy, responsiveness, reliability, and convenience are more important to customers in such situations.⁹