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The satisfaction‐trust paradigm has been recently criticized regarding its ability to deliver positive consumer behavioral outcomes. This study aims to argue that – amongst others – a reason for this unpleasant situation may be the failure of service managers to account for non‐linearities in the satisfaction‐trust paradigm.

The setting for this study was the supermarket retail channel. A total of 942 respondents were “intercepted” in supermarket stores, employing a face‐to‐face personal interviewing method. For the detection of curvilinear effects the study employed the two‐step single indicant method of Ping.

It is posited that consumer trust is an important intervening variable through which non‐linear service evaluation effects translate into word‐of‐mouth. Findings imply that investing resources in satisfaction programs do not do a good job in building positive word‐of‐mouth from a point on. Economic value evaluations and trust judgments seem to be both necessary and sufficient conditions for building consumer relationships.

Theoretically, the work extends the relationship marketing research stream suggesting that curvilinear mechanisms are likely present in the well accepted satisfaction‐trust paradigm. Limitations of the study relate to the generalization of the findings in other sectors besides grocery retailing and its cross‐sectional nature.

The findings of this study suggest that relationship marketing managers would be ill‐advised in their investment decisions should they use a linear‐only terms trust model.

This article extends the trust literature in that it investigates whether consumer trust suffers from diminishing returns. Service providers who strive to build long‐term relationships with their customers may not do a good job if they continue to invest in trust determinants that present diminishing returns to scale.

This paper aims to examine the influence of corporate social performance (CSP) on the emotional attachment of consumers to firms. In contrast to past CSR studies, this research seeks to investigate the role of personality variables as moderating factors.

The study tested hypotheses through an experiment using scenarios, addressing corporate social responsibility activities, manipulating domains like environmental protection, treatment of employees, and charitable giving.

The results indicate that CSP influences consumer‐firm emotional attachment and that this attachment constitutes an unrecognized mediational pathway in the CSP‐loyalty link. The results identify the moderating and strengthening role of altruism, need‐for‐activity, and esteem‐enhancement on the CSP‐emotional attachment link. Finally, the study reveals that attributions are likely to moderate the influence of consumer altruism.

Although the CSP record scenarios reflected real corporate social responsibility practices, future studies employing field experiments or consumer surveys exploring the effects of actual corporate social responsibility initiatives would be valuable to enhance the external validity of these results.

The study helps retailers towards improved and more targeted social responsibility investments. Specifically, retailers targeting consumer groups that are high in altruism, high in need for activity, and high in self‐enhancement motives are probably in a more advantageous position when investing in CSR initiatives as a way to build and further deepen emotional attachment, and indirectly consumer loyalty.

Building on the CSR and attachment literatures, the study investigates the extent to which CSP is capable of influencing customer loyalty through emotion‐laden processes. Furthermore, in contrast to previous CSR studies, this study is one of the first to directly investigate whether consumer differences influence consumer reactions to CSR. Specifically, this study finds that differences in consumers' personality traits may affect the effectiveness of CSR initiatives.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the theoretical and empirical meaningfulness of a composite model of behavioral intentions in a pure mobile internet services context.

This paper starts by investigating the influence of seven service quality determinants on overall service quality perceptions, employing a qualitative research design. Next, these determinants are embedded in a holistic nomological framework depicting the complex interrelationships between prominent service evaluation constructs and behavioral intentions. The model is tested employing partial‐least squares structural equation modeling in the context of a field experiment involving the delivery of music content over real‐world mobile networks and devices.

The study finds that content quality, contextual quality, device quality, connection quality and privacy concerns have a strong positive influence on service quality perceptions. Overall, service quality, value and satisfaction have a simultaneous direct effect on behavioral intentions.

Consumer decision making is complex, and, for gaining favorable consumer behavior, it does not suffice to manage and measure service quality, satisfaction and value in an isolated manner but rather in a collective way.

So as to adopt mobile e‐commerce services consumers require to be rewarded with high levels of outcome quality (e.g., wide selection of music songs, sonic and video quality), anytime and most importantly at any place.

Study results imply that when it comes to specifying service evaluation frameworks employing service quality, satisfaction and value‐operationalized at a cumulative level traditional exchange contexts are not different from electronic commerce exchanges.

The purpose of the study is to investigate loyalty building and the creation of affectionate bonds in the consumer‐firm dyad.

The study relies on face‐to‐face personal interviews in the context of grocery store retailing.

The results identify the significant predictors of consumer‐firm emotional attachment to be firm trust, trust in employees, likeability of service personnel and likeability of co‐consumers, shopping enjoyment, self‐expressiveness, place dependence, and place identity. Consumers' self‐enrichment, self‐gratification and self‐enablement likely influence emotional attachment, which in turn is a strong predictor of behavioral loyalty and word of mouth. Attachment anxiety appears to multiply the effects of emotional attachment on behavioral loyalty and word of mouth.

The cross‐sectional nature of the study precludes definitive conclusions concerning causality between the constructs utilized. The data come from the supermarket retail channel, limiting the generalizibility of the results.

As the results suggest that the consumer's self‐enrichment seems to be the most important factor in determining emotional attachment, managers should incorporate the notion of emotional attachment into strategic performance management systems.

The study incorporates the notion of consumer heterogeneity into the relationship anxiety construct, arguing in favor of a non‐additive consumer‐firm emotional attachment nomological network.

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between self-congruence and attendee engagement in explaining emotional attachment in the context of cultural events.

Structural equation modelling with partial least squares analysis has been applied. Data were collected from 421 respondents through an onsite survey during the Yi Peng and Loy Krathong festive week in Thailand.

The findings revealed that self-congruence (i.e. actual self-congruence and ideal self-congruence) has a positive influence on attendee engagement. When attendees' actual self and ideal self-match with the event image, they are more likely to actively engage in the event activities.

The findings offer insights into one type of events, the cultural event, which is a common event in Thailand. This study is also one among a handful works that investigates the moderating role of perceived crowding on the relationship between attendees' actual and ideal self-congruence and engagement with the event. Although the findings do not suggest a significant moderating effect, this study provides preliminary insight into how perceived crowding shapes the perception of tourists in a cultural event context.