Purpose This paper aims to increase understanding of how the strength of the relationship between service failure-induced customer anger and revenge intentions might be influenced by attitudinal moderators that are both within and outside the realm of the service firm’s control. Drawing on past research, the authors hypothesize that customers’ perceptions of the corporate reputation and silent endurance constitute boundary conditions of the relationship between service failure-related customer anger and revenge intentions. Design/methodology/approach In line with past service failure research, the authors test the hypotheses using a scenario-based online experiment with 243 participants. Findings This research reaffirms the positive relationship between anger and revenge intentions and finds support for the hypothesized boundary conditions; customers with better corporate reputation perceptions and higher levels of silent endurance express weaker revenge intentions than those with poor corporate reputation perceptions and lower levels of silent endurance. Originality/value This research offers unique insights into how service organizations can buffer the detrimental effects of service failure-induced customer anger.

With ever increasing amounts of marketplace information, decreasing inter-brand differences, and increasingly complex products confusion is becoming a global problem for consumers the world over. Although confusion has been identified as a problem for consumers and marketers in many countries and have not been shown to be cross-culturally valid, most measures of consumer confusion have been developed in western countries, including Walsh et al.'s ( 2007) consumer confusion proneness (CCP) scale, and have not been shown to be cross-culturally valid. Thus, relatively little is known about the cross-cultural differences in confusion proneness. Using the three-dimensional, nine-item CCP scale developed in Germany, this study explores cross-cultural differences in consumer proneness in the United States as well as in Germany and Thailand. The results reveal that some factor loadings of the CCP scale are not invariant across samples and that unique factor structures emerge for the U.S. and Thai samples. The results are discussed as well as the marketing implications.

No abstract

With ever increasing amounts of marketplace information, decreasing inter-brand differences, and increasingly complex products confusion is becoming a global problem for consumers the world over. Although confusion has been identified as a problem for consumers and marketers in many countries and have not been shown to be cross-culturally valid, most measures of consumer confusion have been developed in western countries, including Walsh et al.'s ( 2007) consumer confusion proneness (CCP) scale, and have not been shown to be cross-culturally valid. Thus, relatively little is known about the cross-cultural differences in confusion proneness. Using the three-dimensional, nine-item CCP scale developed in Germany, this study explores cross-cultural differences in consumer proneness in the United States as well as in Germany and Thailand. The results reveal that some factor loadings of the CCP scale are not invariant across samples and that unique factor structures emerge for the U.S. and Thai samples. The results are discussed as well as the marketing implications.

No abstract