Abstract:
This thesis presents a phenomenological case study of customer delight
during product evaluation. The literature presents two existing 'theories' of
customer delight. The first, from the field of Consumer Research, presents a
cognitive model of post-purchase customer delight as the affective result of
expectation disconfirmation. The second, from the Manufacturing literature,
proposes that customers are delighted when products contain unexpected
features or levels of qualities that exceed expectations. This research was
motivated by the fact that our current understanding of this commercially
important phenomenon is confined by expectation-based thinking.
Furthermore, both streams of research have neglected to study the naturalistic
occurrence of delight from the customer's perspective. The aim of this
research was to generate an integrated understanding of the affective,
behavioural, and cognitive nature of customer delight and its product basis. A
case study methodology, incorporating interview, self-report and observational
methods, was adopted to generate a triangulated understanding of productbased
customer delight. The naturalistic product evaluations of 918 customers
were observed and self-reported delight reactions were collected from 66
research participants. In total 414 customer delight reactions were analysed in
detail. This approach aimed to generate new theory, rather than test the
existing models, and this new integrative understanding of customer delight is
the primary contribution of this thesis. A new model of product-based
customer delight is presented, and the existing Manufacturing model is
extended to incorporate the empirical findings of the case study. Whilst the
findings of this research support concepts contained within the existing
theories of customer delight, they also demonstrate their limitations. The
cognitive and affective diversity of customer delight reactions, previously
unaccounted for in the literature, was uncovered and five product-based
routes to delight were identified. The emergent theory successfully integrates
the two previously separate concepts of delight and builds upon them by
identifying the behaviours associated with customer delight resulting from both
attribute-based and holistic product appraisals.
