Service Captivity: No Choice, No Voice, No Power

Abstract

Service captivity occurs when consumers engage in services that significantly constrain their choice, voice, and power—and yet, despite these restrictions, consumers are limited in their option to exit the exchange. The authors conceptualize and develop an empirically grounded framework of service captivity, contextualize service captivity within two settings to further support the framework and expose negative service delivery, and then highlight its pervasiveness through a typology of captivity archetypes. Service captivity is more pervasive than current marketing literature would suggest, and consumers experience constraints that can lead to felt vulnerability, which then contributes to a negative spiral of service. Findings from this research extend the broader marketing conversation by revealing consumers’ common market experiences and highlighting the importance of understanding service captivity for consumer and policy researchers. The authors discuss the potential for policy makers and consumer advocates to interrupt the negative service spiral and alleviate consumer vulnerability through policy and market actions connected to service captivity.

Customer captivity, negative word of mouth and well-being: a mixed-methods study

“…Price unfairness perceptions moderate the relationships between perceived service quality and satisfaction and between satisfaction and NWOM for railway services, but only the relationship between satisfaction and NWOM for postal services and between perceived service quality and NWOM for mobile phone services. These differences likely reflect varying levels of captivity that arise across the three industries (Rayburn et al, 2020). Railway and postal services are quasi-monopolies, whereas mobile phone services impose contractual captivity.…”

“…With a powerdependence perspective (Emerson, 1962), Rayburn (2015) further demonstrates that customer captivity stems from subjective perception of asymmetry in the power relationship between customers and service providers. Subsequently, Rayburn et al (2020) qualitatively investigate the concept and identify two conditions of customer captivity as follows: perceived need and lack of available alternatives. Under these conditions, when perceiving they do not have any choice, customers are left with the feeling that they have little or no power and agency over their service relationship, and therefore, feel captive.…”

“…In Switzerland, customers of these services often feel captive in their relationships with the providers because the railway and postal services benefit from quasimonopoly situations, and mobile phone services generally impose long-term subscriptions or high switching costs, as well as uncertain quality across alternative services. By investigating the impact of customer captivity in these three services, with varying levels of captivity (Rayburn et al, 2020), we increase the generalizability of the findings.…”

The COVID-19 Pandemic at the Intersection of Marketing and Public Policy

“…Yet it also is important to remember that consumer vulnerability cannot simply be distilled according to demographic categories such as income when thinking about the virus or about pandemic mitigation and recovery efforts. Vulnerability is multidimensional, shifting, and often context dependent (Baker 2009; Rayburn, Mason, and Volkers 2020). For example, an immunocompromised consumer in Sweden, where stay-at-home orders have been relatively lax (Savage 2020), may be incredibly vulnerable owing to her or his context but by all other markers (e.g., race, ethnicity, age, income) be classified as invulnerable.…”

Consumer Power and Access

“…Our special issue authors also provide some significant advances in situations of severely constrained choice. Rayburn, Mason, and Volkers (2020) clearly express one of the issues that sparks interest in the domain of consumer power and access. Their conceptualization of "service captivity" describes situations beyond "financial, social, psychological, legal, or emotional costs" (p. 156) in which consumers perceive themselves in a situation in which they do not feel exit from a service relationship is actually possible.…”