Consequences of ambivalence on satisfaction and loyalty

Abstract

The key objective of this study was to understand the consequences of subjective ambivalence on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the satisfaction-loyalty relationship. The conceptual and theoretical discussions were derived largely from recent research in social psychology and integrated with marketing literature on satisfaction and loyalty. Given that product evaluations are typically positive and extreme, these findings indicate a negative relationship between ambivalence and satisfaction. Even though a great deal of the variance in ambivalence is shared with satisfaction, ambivalence did prove to have an independent and direct effect on loyalty. Ambivalent consumers are not only less loyal because they are less satisfied, but for other reasons, as well. Ambivalence was not found to moderate the satisfaction-loyalty relationship. The results of the study underscore the importance of taking ambivalence into consideration when measuring satisfaction and modeling satisfaction-loyalty relationships.

When the Future Technology is Now: Paradoxical Attitudes of Consumer and Evaluation of IoT Service

“…Competence/incompetence are a typical paradox of technology operationalized by the previous researches [11] [13]. Consistent with the previous researches on technology paradox, the model proposes that conflicting positive and negative experience underlies the evaluation of a technology [13] [26]. Similarly, this model insists that positive satisfiers such as efficiency, technology trust affect perceived competence, while negative dissatisfiers such as performance ambiguity, chaos affect perceived incompetence, resulting in IoT service evaluation.…”

Urban destination loyalty drivers and cross-national moderator effects: The case of Barcelona

“…However, some studies have identified an asymmetrical and non-linear relationship between satisfaction and loyalty (Bowen & Chen, 2001;Gómez, McLaughlin, & Wittink, 2004) and argue that increasing customer satisfaction does not mean producing higher levels of loyalty (Bennett & Rundle-Thiele, 2004;Wu, Zhou, & Wu, 2011). Other authors affirm that the consumer's ambivalence moderates the relationship between satisfaction and loyalty (Olsen, Wilcox, & Olsson, 2005) and still others that the antecedent of loyalty is the affective or emotional component of satisfaction and not the cognitive component (You & Dean, 2001). It is necessary to underline that in the marketing of products and services, trust is an antecedent that moderates the relationships between satisfaction and loyalty.…”

Customer retention when the customer's future usage is uncertain

“…Existing research suggests that uncertainty about the firm's ability to deliver product and service quality affects the retention decision (Rust et al, 1999;Bolton, Lemon, & Bramlett, 2006;Olsen, Wilcox, & Olsson, 2005). However, the question of how consumers incorporate uncertainty about their own willingness or ability to use services in future periods into their decisions to keep versus drop a given service relationship (i.e., their keep/drop decisions) remains unanswered.…”