Satisfaction: a behavioral perspective on the consumer

Designed for advanced MBA and doctoral courses in Consumer Behavior and Customer Satisfaction, this is the definitive text on the meaning, causes, and consequences of customer satisfaction. It covers every psychological aspect of satisfaction formation, and the contents are applicable to all consumables - product or service. Author Richard L. Oliver traces the history of consumer satisfaction from its earliest roots, and brings together the very latest thinking on the consequences of satisfying (or not satisfying) a firm's customers. He describes today's best practices in business, and broadens the determinants of satisfaction to include needs, quality, fairness, and regret ('what might have been'). The book culminates in Oliver's detailed model of consumption processing and his satisfaction measurement scale. The text concludes with a section on the long-term effects of satisfaction, and why an understanding of satisfaction psychology is vitally important to top management

Introduction: What is satisfaction? -- pt. 1. Basic satisfaction mechanisms: The performance of attributes, features, and dimensions -- Expectations and related comparative standards -- The expectancy disconfirmation model of satisfaction -- pt. 2. Alternative and supplementary comparative operators: Need fulfillment in a consumer satisfaction context -- Quality: the object of desire -- The many varieties of value in the consumption experience -- Equity: how consumers interpret fairness -- Regret and hindsight: what might have been and what I knew would be -- pt. 3. Satisfaction processes and mechanisms: Cognitive dissonance: fears of what the future will bring (and a few hopes) -- Attribution in the satisfaction response: Why did it happen? -- Emotional expression in the satisfaction response -- The processing of consumption -- pt. 4. Satisfaction's consequences: What happens next? After satisfaction: the short-run consequences -- Loyalty and financial impact: long-term effects of satisfaction