The Impact of customer satisfaction, regret and attribute expectations on consumer choices: a preliminary investigation

This paper examines the impacts of a given product experience on customer satisfaction, regret and attribute expectations and the subsequent impact on brand choice. A key weakness of many studies of customer satisfaction and regret is the lack of an appropriate mechanism to determine the consequences of product experiences on key indicators such as subsequent brand choice and market shares. Although many studies measure the likelihood of repurchase, typically the framework does not allow for consideration of alternatives when the respondents are considering re-purchase behaviour. This lack of consideration of alternatives extends to the original purchase decision. This paper proposes a three stage examination of the process incorporating the original purchase decision, a product experience and subsequent purchase. This 3 stage process is examined using a designed choice experiment. This paper is also differentiated from typical studies in customer satisfaction and/or regret in that the experimental design includes both mean and variance of attribute expectations in the choice stages. Binary logit analysis and Ordinal logistic regression are used to analyse the impact of experience variables on choice behaviour.