Getting Emotional about Quality: Questioning and Elaborating the Satisfaction Concept

Consumption has generally become more fragmented, hedonic and individual specific, satisfying not only functional but also emotional needs. In parallel, customer satisfaction is now thought to be both a cognitive and affective response, and the closely related concept of job satisfaction is commonly seen as an emotional reaction. The reasoning within quality management does, however, still lean heavily toward cognitive judgements (i.e. performance ratings), the emotional component clearly being under explored. Further, performance variables have shown not to be significant in predicting satisfaction for certain “experience products”, the effect fully mediated by emotions. as a consequence a cognitive judgement based quality cocnept has lost its ability to predict satisfaction, which clearly contradicts with the modern quality definition, stressing quality as the ability to satisfy the customer. Emotions have however entered the quality discourse and it has been proposed that having customers that are merely feeling satisfied will not suffice. Instead, there has been a plethora of executive exhortations in the trade press calling on business to “delight the customer”. Strategies for doing so have however usually been imprecise and unclear, and the different drivers of delight and satisfaction are not well explored. This paper aims to complement the previous cognitive dominance by exploring the multiple emotional responses involved in customer satisfaction. A conclusion being that we currently are measuring something, in terms of satisfied, that is more or less independent of what we aim for, in terms of delight. It is also most likely that ‐ depending on the situation, product, and person – other positive and negative emotions are more important outcomes of purchase and usage than merely satisfaction. It is questioned whether a single, summary response such as satisfaction is feasible or even desirable.