How gratitude improves relationship marketing outcomes for young consumers
Building strong customer relationships is essential to an organisation’s long-term success, especially when the service is delivered over an extended duration. To enhance customer perceptions of relationship strength and longevity, organisations invest substantial resources as part of their relationship marketing efforts. However, existing relationship marketing discourse often takes a somewhat myopic economic/utilitarian focus, thus overlooks the potential psychological effects of emotions on relationship strength and longevity.
Using social exchange theory, this study offers a broader examination of the psychological impact of an organisation’s relationship marketing investments on customer perceptions of their long-term relationship with the organisation. Specifically, it explores the mediating role of gratitude on how customer’s perceptions of relationship marketing investments elicit positive relationship marketing outcomes, including customer overall satisfaction with, trust in, and affective commitment to the organisation. Moreover, the model proposed by this study incorporates customer cynicism and perceptions of organisation’s benevolence to explore their moderating roles.
Method and sample
A paper-based survey was administered to young consumers in Gen Y and Gen Z attending three universities in Australia to address the limited empirical relationship marketing research on this cohort. The final sample consisted of 1,082 respondents aged between 17 and 30 years old (N=1082), who completed the surveys anonymously and without observation. Participants were first asked to identify their university and recall the reason for enrolment there. A series of questions using previously validated scales were then presented to measure the constructs examined.
The previously validated measures were pretested twice. Firstly, a pilot questionnaire was completed by 40 participants, who were either PhD-qualified or PhD candidates from
Australian universities, to identify if the measures adequately and appropriately measured gratitude and other constructs. Secondly, a panel of experts evaluated the suitability of the survey items for measuring the conceptual domain. The data was then cleaned and analysed using various tests.
Key findings
- Customer gratitude is a mediating psychological mechanism that better explains the effectiveness of an organisation’s relationship marketing investments in enhancing customer-perceived relationship marketing outcomes. Participants perceive a sense of gratitude for the benefits offered by service providers, and this positive emotion plays a mediating role in enhancing satisfaction, building trust, and developing commitment and psychological attachment between the customer and organisation.
- Customer-perceived benevolence had a small but significant moderating effect on the relationship between customers’ perceptions of the organisations marketing investments and gratitude. Customer felt more gratitude for relationship marketing efforts perceived as benevolent, compared to actions that were merely considered duty bound.
- The moderating effect of customer cynicism was found to be non-significant, which could possibly be explained by the strength of customer gratitude, which overpowers the negative effect of cynicism.
Recommendations
Younger consumers are forthcoming in responding positively to the relationship investments made by their service providers towards improving the mutually beneficial relationship. They feel gratitude for the benefits received or anticipated from organisation’s relationship marketing efforts, and will reciprocate with enhanced satisfaction, trust, and commitment.
Therefore, relationship marketing investments, such as loyalty programmes, discounts, and individually targeting offers, should not merely focus on the economic benefits and rational utilities, but also other psychological mechanisms. Organisations should re-evaluate their relationship marketing programmes and endeavour to offer benefits that evoke a high level of gratitude and allow customers to reciprocate benefits.
These benefit management programmes should be systematically designed and implemented across the organisation’s different branches and hierarchical levels. Moreover, periodic training from the human resource department or mentoring from a senior manager should be provided to staff members as part of career development programmes, to ensure they can integrate benevolence and empathy into service delivery.
Researcher
More information
The research article is also available on eprints.