Gabriele Pizzi

The Temporal Construal of Customer Satisfaction

Traditional customer satisfaction research considers satisfaction judgments invariant to temporal distance. We conduct two experiments and a field study to show that the amount of time elapsed between a service consumption experience and its evaluation influences satisfaction judgments. We show that consumers rely on concrete attributes to represent near-past (NP) experiences and on abstract attributes to represent distant-past (DP) experiences (i.e., different construal levels). The findings indicate that construal mechanisms generate intertemporal shifts in the importance of the attributes driving satisfaction over time (Study 1), in the weights assigned to abstract and concrete attributes of a past service experience (Study 2), and in overall satisfaction judgments when abstract and concrete attributes perform differently (Study 3). Overall, the results provide support for the idea that satisfaction judgments shift over time as a result of the different psychological mechanisms that are activated as a function of the time elapsing between the service experience and its evaluation. Managers are advised to adopt longitudinal approaches to customer satisfaction measurement: An immediate assessment to capture customers’ evaluations of the performance of the concrete details of the experience and a delayed assessment to measure customer satisfaction with more abstract and goal-related features of the experience.

To buy or to rent? An experimental study on the antecedents of consumers’ acquisition-mode decisions

Renting is a widely used mode of gaining access to goods, yet research on how consumers decide whether to buy or rent a good is still limited, leaving unclear whether a buy-or-rent choice is driven by situational (i.e., context-related) or dispositional (i.e., personality-related) factors. This research jointly addresses the role of situational and dispositional factors on the rent-or-buy decision, to shed light on what actually drives consumers’ preference for one or the other acquisition mode. Results of an experimental study, conducted using a real-life choice situation involving a leading automotive brand, show that overall consumers strongly prefer buying to renting, regardless of the quality of the alternatives they are evaluating. This evidence challenges the commonly held idea that through rental consumers can enjoy superior-quality goods that they could otherwise not afford. Furthermore, results show that specific situational (time horizon) and dispositional (importance of possession, locus of control, convenience orientation) factors may affect individuals’ intention to buy or rent. Theoretical and managerial implications are also discussed.

Eating With Your Eyes: How Packaging Visual Cues Affect Content Estimation and Self-control in Virtue and Vice Food

Abstract This research investigates the effects of visual cues depicted on food packaging on consumers’ estimates of the contained amount and consumers’ self-control intentions. Results from two experiments show that the number of product units shown on the package drives perceptions and behavioral intentions in food categories where product size tends to be quite standardized, supporting the “see more, expect more” effect reported by previous literature, but adding a “see virtue, expect more” effect triggered by product type. Instead, when product size tends to vary across manufacturers, picture size has a greater effect on consumers’ content estimations and self-control intention than the number of product units depicted, suggesting the existence of a “see small, expect more” effect according to which consumers estimate larger content when the package portrays smaller product units. Results stimulate awareness of the effects that can be conveyed by images on packaging, on content estimates and consumer self-control.

L’effetto del packaging sulle percezioni di qualità del prodotto nel mercato vinicolo

Il packaging si e evoluto nel tempo da semplice contenitore a strumento chiave della comunicazione di marketing. Se la letteratura, da un lato, ha approfondito l’effetto del packaging sulle associazioni mentali che influenzano le scelte dei consumatori, d’altro lato non ha ancora chiarito se tale effetto si estenda alla sfera sensoriale traducendosi in distorsioni percettive capaci di influenzare anche le valutazioni dei consumatori. Questo studio si concentra sulle percezioni di qualita da parte dei consumatori in funzione del packaging utilizzato per confezionare il vino, separando l’effetto del contenitore dal contenuto. I risultati di uno studio sperimentale mostrano come diversi tipi di packaging inducano differenti percezioni di qualita perfino riguardo lo stesso prodotto.