The influence of service quality and anticipated emotions on donor loyalty: an empirical analysis in blood centres in Spain

Abstract

Blood donation centres need to recruit and retain donors to ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare systems, as COVID-19 has recently evidenced. In such risky settings, blood donation services must increase donations. Service quality can increase donations but its evaluation only amounts to a cognitive evaluation, and not to an emotional appraisal. Consequently, both service quality and emotions should be considered when predicting donor behaviour. In fact, donating blood is an emotionally charged service, thus representing an ideal setting to investigate how emotions influence consumer behaviour. This research proposes a new method to predict blood donors’ intentions by integrating a cognitive approach measuring perceived quality, and an emotional approach including anticipated emotions (both positive and negative) of ‘donation’ and ‘non-donation’. Based on a sample of 30,621 active Spanish donors, it is concluded that service quality is an antecedent for anticipated emotions and that both service quality and anticipated emotions influence donor loyalty. Designing the donation process based on quality criteria would provoke encouraging emotions and diminish discouraging emotions, therefore improving donor loyalty.

Rational or altruistic: the impact of social media information exposure on Chinese youth’s willingness to donate blood

“…An unexpected finding was that there was no significant positive correlation between attitude toward blood donation and willingness to donate, a finding that is different from established studies ( 62–64 ), which demonstrated a positive correlation between positive attitude toward blood donation and willingness to donate, but this study found no significant positive relationship between attitude and willingness to donate. It was hypothesized that there are other factors in the process of attitude to behavioral willingness to donate, such as fear of donating blood ( 65 ), anxiety about donating blood ( 66 ), anticipatory emotions ( 67 ), and the environment of donating blood ( 68 ), which are important factors affecting the public’s willingness to donate blood. Masser ( 45 ) demonstrated that there is a positive relevant relationship between attitude toward donating blood and self-efficacy, which is consistent with the hypotheses of the present study.…”