Donna J. Hill

The effects of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice on postcomplaint behavior

Abstract This study examines the effects of distributive, interactional, and procedural justice on complainants repatronage and negative word-of-mouth intentions. In order to test the hypotheses an experiment was conducted; twelve different scenarios were created, each describing a situation in which a customer was returning a product to a retail store. In the various scenarios, the customer was allowed to exchange the product or was given a partial discount on a new product, was treated either with courtesy and respect or was treated rudely, and was able to take care of the problem promptly or was asked to come back to the store the next day. Subjects were asked to read one of the twelve scenarios and to imagine that this situation happened to them, they were then asked to imagine how they would have felt and what they subsequently would have done. In order to make the scenarios more vivid, subjects then watched a videotape depicting the same event. Of the three dimensions, interactional justice had the largest impact on complainants repatronage and negative word-of-mouth intentions.

An Investigation of Visualization and Documentation Strategies in Services Advertising

This study examines two advertising strategies— documentation and visualization—on several measures of ad effectiveness across two different types of service offerings (utilitarian and hedonic). For both service types, a visualization strategy was found to have a positive effect on informativeness, perceived quality, and likelihood of use (but had no effect on uniqueness). As expected, the documentation strategy had a positive effect on all of the dependent measures within the hedonic service environment but had no effect in the utilitarian setting. This is consistent with dual processing theories and suggests that individuals are more attentive to various forms of documentary information (e.g., statistics, figures, charts, testimonials, comparisons) when the service offering provides hedonic value.