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The purpose of this research is to address an important gap in identity research – how does consumer identity affect satisfaction following an unambiguous product experience.

Two experiments were conducted involving a product experience scenario and a service recovery encounter.

Study results demonstrate that experience valence moderates the impact of identity on customer satisfaction. Specifically, we find that identity improves satisfaction with a positive (but does not increase dissatisfaction with a negative) experience, and this effect arises via enhanced performance perceptions under positive experience rather than expectations.

Our research investigates whether the prior research argument that identity is a powerful and “sticky” source of brand evaluation is robust to product experience. Specifically, we extend the disconfirmation paradigm of satisfaction by identifying identity as a driver of satisfaction and by testing whether identity effects emerge via biased perceptions of performance or altered expectations.

Our findings offer interesting managerial implications in terms of using identity marketing to enhance customer satisfaction with positive experiences and to increase the effectiveness of recovery from brand failures, but identity marketing cannot shield a brand from negative product experience.

To our knowledge, this research is first to demonstrate the joint effects of identity and experience information on satisfaction using two different identities and settings.

The purpose of this paper is to study the informational role played by an intermediary in the service industry.

The paper used survey and choice data collected from agents and customers, respectively, in the hotel industry.

The paper shows that informational role of agents in choice varies from mere facilitation of the transaction (e.g. making reservation) to a more active role involving accurate predictions about attributes that consumers will perceive important, more realistic performance evaluation of choice options and providing information about experience attributes. The results also show how an agent's role depends on customer's prior knowledge about the choice options, the goal underlying service consumption (e.g. business vs vacation travel), benefits sought by the consumer and the agent's perception about a long term relationship with the consumer. Finally, the results also reveal a unique pattern of differences between agents and consumers in the perceived importance and performance ratings of various features of the service.

This research is limited to agents in the hotel industry. The hypotheses should be tested on other service agent industries such as airlines and restaurants. Future research should consider other alternative sources of information that consumers may use, such as printed material.

The unique nature of the data set – that is, information from the agent as well as the consumer on the same transaction – offers a great opportunity to study the two different points of view and test some hypothesis regarding the degree to which the players understand each other.