Dimensionality of Responses to Customer Satisfaction with Low-Involvement Low-Risk Frequent Purchases: the Example of Grocery Retailing

This working paper explores affective, cognitive, conative and action consequences of customer satisfaction focusing on the dimensionality of responses to satisfaction and their interrelations. For the purpose of the present working paper, affective, cognitive, conative and action consequences of customer satisfaction are operationalised as loyalty dimensions following the recommendations by Oliver (1997). Yet, before applying the analysis to the interrelations of satisfaction and loyalty, the research presented in this working paper tests this commonly recognized factor structure of loyalty and its applicability to retail settings. As a result of the test, a different factor structure emerges that suits the research context better than the commonly recognized loyalty dimensions proposed by Oliver (1997).The working paper looks further into the type of responses to customer satisfaction, revealing affective/emotional rather than cognitive/rational nature of satisfaction consistently with findings by Cadotte, Woodruff and Jenkins (1987), Fornell and Wernerfelt (1987), Halstead, Hartman, and Schmidt (1994), Mano and Oliver (1993), Neal (1999), Oliver (1981, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1997), Spreng, MacKenzie and Olshavsky (1996), Westbrook (1987), Westbrook and Oliver (1991), Westbrook and Reilly (1983) and many other researchers. The research findings presented in this working paper suggest that neither cognitive nor action measures describe satisfaction judgments adequately and additional affective or conative measures are needed for that purpose. The research also finds that “relative” mixed cognitive-affective or cognitive-conative measures might also be suited to describe satisfaction judgments as compared to the purely cognitive measures. The affective nature of satisfaction itself is also hypothesized to be the main reason behind the satisfaction influence mainly on affective and to the lesser extent also to cognitive-affective and cognitive-conative dimensions of loyalty, which is revealed in the course of the present research. The empirical part of the working paper is based on a pan-national ad hoc survey of grocery retail customers (999 respondents) carried out in Estonia regarding their grocery and convenience goods retail purchases.customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, consumer behaviour, consumer psychology, retailing