Does advertising exposure prior to customer satisfaction survey enhance customer satisfaction ratings?
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Does advertising exposure prior to customer satisfaction survey enhance customer satisfaction ratings? Eun Young Lee & Chan Su Park
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract As an increasing number of firms adopt customer satisfaction (CS) scores as one of their performance measures, they tend to invest in diverse activities to enhance their CS scores. Educating and rewarding employees and investing in marketing research are considered genuine efforts by firms to serve their customers better. However, there are some activities for which one should question the motivation behind them. Increasing media advertising prior to conducting CS surveys in the hope of positively affecting prospective survey respondents is one such example. While this practice has been observed at least in some parts of the world, there has been little, if any, research on whether such a practice could indeed lead to higher CS ratings for the firm. Drawing on Feldman and Lynch’s framework, extant research on contextual factors in the CS survey, and the assimilation–contrast effect, this paper develops a set of hypotheses and tests them in two experiments. We find that advertising exposure prior to conducting a CS survey enhances a firm’s CS ratings, while the same advertisements may backfire for those respondents who displayed complaining behavior towards the firm. This paper concludes by providing implications for marketers keen on obtaining higher CS scores and third-party organizations releasing CS scores in public. Keywords Customer satisfaction . Survey . Contextual factors . Advertising . Assimilation–contrast effect
1 Introduction Customer satisfaction (hereafter, CS) has been given a lot of importance by firms and marketers. Many firms have added customer satisfaction index (hereafter, CSI) to their key performance indicators (KPIs) at the corporate or the department level. Therefore, many marketers are paying a great deal of attention to CS survey results of their firms, brands, or products. E. Y. Lee : C. S. Park (*) Korea University Business School, 145 Anam-ro, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul 136-701, South Korea e-mail: [email protected]
Mark Lett
Although firms typically conduct their own CS surveys, there are third-party organizations that conduct CS surveys of a broad cross-section of firms and release the results through mass media. One such example is the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), which has been adopted in countries such as Colombia, Mexico, Singapore, Korea, Sweden, Turkey, and the UK. As CS scores of a firm and those of its competitors are made public, CS survey results have become even more critical for firms. Hence, firms implement diverse activities to improve their CS scores, such as educating and rewarding employees and investing in marketing research. These activities are considered as genuine efforts by firms to serve their customers better. However, there are some activities for which one should question the motives behind them. Typically, these activities are conducted just prior to a CS
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