A Study of the Self-Recovery Behavior of Prospects to the Provider’s Service Encounter Failure in Luxury Goods Industry

Huang, J. S., and Chen, P. C. 2016. A Study of the Self-Recovery Behavior of Prospects to the Provider’s Service Encounter Failure in Luxury Goods Industry. NTU Management Review, 27 (1): 99-128. https://doi.org/10.6226/NTUMR.2016.FEB.C103-038

Je-Sheng Huang, Assistant Professor, Department of International Business, Tamkang University
Peng-Chun Chen, Master, Graduate Institute of International Business, Tamkang University

Abstract

This article explores why most prospects will stick to the same brand even after experiencing service encounter failure from the brand’s service provider in the luxury goods industry. With an aim of understanding this paradoxical phenomenon, the authors propose a new construct, which is known as “prospect’s self-recovery behavior,” to explain the reasons why prospects do not switch and to deliberate on the underlying consumption values that they are seeking. For the research design,the authors use focus groups to collect data about service encounter failures, employ content analysis to identify critical incidents, and combine the method of sequential critical incident analysis to interpret how the prospects develop their self-recovery mechanisms so as to protect themselves from similar service failures in the next service encounter. Furthermore, this research has firstly combined related theoretical foundations from different fields into a conceptual framework to successfully address the research issue; these theories include attribution theory, process interdependency and outcome interdependency, prestige-seeking consumer behavior, and functional analysis of emotion. Based on the deduction drawn from sequential critical incident analysis and hermeneutic mode of interpretation, the finding enhances our understanding of self-recovery from the consumer’s perspective and provides a useful foundation for future studies.  


Keywords

service encounter failureprospect's self-recovery behaviorsequential critical incident analysisself-construalself-association


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