Examining the Effect of Emotion to the Online Shopping Stores’ Service Recovery: A Meta-Analysis

Huan Minh Nguyen, Hieu Le Minh

1 Faculty of Social Sciences & Humanities, Ton Duc Thang University, No.19 Nguyen Huu Tho Str., Tan Phong Ward,Dist. 7, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

2 Faculty of Business Administration, Ton Duc Thang University, No.19 Nguyen Huu Tho Str., Tan Phong Ward, Dist.7, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

1 Introduction

Nowadays people’s daily life has strong involvement in internet, e-commerce has been leading the market transactions for years. Compared to the physical store shopping, online shopping is more convenient for consumers with real-time shopping. Brand loyalty has verified that it is a critical indicator on maintaining continuity in the long term buyer–seller relationships, it can not only assist in keeping the existed clients, but also bring in potential customers through the effect of word-of-mouth (Kim et al., 2004; Anderson and Swaminathan, 2011).

Harris and Goode (2004) indicated that brand loyalty is a sequential of the formation of which directly and indirectly related to trust, satisfaction, perceived value, and service quality, as well as, it is the central driver of purchasing intentions. However, the loyalty to the online context is very hard to evaluate by only concern repurchased behavior. Most of the online consumers tend to focus on convenience and lower searching-cost concerns, not every product or service consumption customers are willing to spend time on making-decision(White and Yanamandram, 2004). The type of customers mostly based on their past experience of consumption, their repurchase actions are the result from spurious loyalty (Ganesh et al., 2000). Therefore, a true loyalty customer should have positive attitude to the brand and repeat purchase behavior in the meantime (Ban-dyopadhyay and Martell, 2007).

Furthermore, consumers interact with thousands of brands online, but they rarely develop emotional attachments to a brand. Anderson and Srinivasan (2003) noticed that consumers' affective experiences in the retail environment go beyond immediate sales; it means an attachment is a type of emotional bond that binds the consumer to particular brands. From a marketing perspective, it is what helps to explain why consumers are committed to certain brands; they impact the future relationship between the consumer and the brand, in the context of service recovery of online shopping stores particularly.

Due to the characteristics of indirect contact, online shopping often generates a lot of trade disputes (i.e.,service failure). Service failure of online stores often occurs because of the lack of the opportunity to interact with customers face to face, which results in an inability to make immediate service recovery (Wolfinbarger and Gilly, 2001). In other words, under the condition of service failure, consumers already have consumption experiences on the online shopping stores, they probably become their customers for a period of time, and some affective experiences have formed in the customers’ minds.

Recently, the effect of emotional attachment cues on consumer purchased behavior has received increasing managerial and research attention (Chang and Wang, 2008; Davis et al., 2007). However, few studies have examined how it affects consumers’ online shopping behavior.

Previous literatures indicate that trust (e.g., Sparks and Browning, 2011; Grayson et al., 2008), fairness perception (e.g. Martinez-tur et al., 2006), brand loyalty (e.g., Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2001; Sparks and Browning, 2011) are three critical variables on maintaining continuity in long term buyer–seller relationships in the studies of normal consumer purchase decision process. Accordingly, this study specifically intents to identify the impact of emotional attachment in the context of service recovery.

Moreover, trust, fairness perception, and word-of-mouth have been identified as critical mediators that influence customers’ online brand loyalty. (Chau et al., 2007; Chen and Barnes, 2007; Lim, 2003; Lin, 2007;Mitchell, 1999; Wang and Emurian, 2005). Therefore, this study adopts both trust and perceived service recovery fairness as major mediating variables in the research framework. And adopting brand loyalty to assess the effect of emotional attachment in the online shopping stores under the circumstances of service recovery.The research questions on this study are as follows:

· In the context of online service recovery, if there are emotional bond between consumers and the brand of online shopping stores, does the service recovery success important? Would the impact of emotional attachment much stronger than the effect of service recovery fairness?

· Is the emotional attachment influences on the impaired trust of consumers under the circumstances of service recovery?

· Does consumer emotional attachment impact on their brand loyalty through the mediators of trust and service recovery fairness perception? Does the moderating effect of emotional attachment occur in the above relationships?

Those questions have not been widely acknowledged. Thus, this study attempts to extend the understanding of emotional attachment, as well as, the role of perceived service recovery fairness, trust, and word-ofmouth and brand loyalty in the context of service recovery of online shopping stores.

2 Theoretical Foundation And Research Hypotheses

2.1 Emotional Attachment and Attachment Theory

The concept of emotional attachment to brands is drawn from attachment theory (Bowlby, 1979), which was originally proposed three features to explain deep attachments on human needs that infants formed with caregivers, these features respectively involve the need for comfort, support, security and consistency, this strong and complex constellation and of attachment feeling and behaviors is associated with emotion-laden targetspecific bond between a person and a specific object, particularly in the context of mother-child relationship(Hazan and Shaver, 1987). The emotional attachment of brand refers to hot affecting between the self of the consumer and brands, a fervent emotion will inspire consumers’ desire to the brand. Having the brand makes consumers a satisfied feeling, not able to have it makes consumers generate frustration or anger, and sadness of loss, and will expect to have it again (Park et al., 2006).

The nature of attachment is “emotional bonding in psychology”; the attachments of emotion are established as the incentive to satisfy emotional needs, and attachments very in strength. The degree of emotional attachment may impact on the prediction of the nature on an individual’s interaction with the object. Moreover, prior literatures have found that stronger attachments were associated with stronger feelings of connection, affection, passion, and love (Bowlby, 1979; Brennan et al., 1998; Collins and Read, 1990, 1994; Thomson et al., 2005). Repeated interactions may result in attachment (Patwardhan and Balasubramanian, 2011).

Although the attachment has been examined in interpersonal contexts originally, research in marketing recently, has extended the concept of attachment on consumer-brand relationships (e.g., Keller, 2001; Thomson et al., 2005; Swaminathan et al., 2009) and organizational behavior (e.g., Meyer and Allen, 1997). Over the decade, some marketing researchers suggest that marketers should try to develop attachments with their target consumers through marketplace entities, which involve product brands (Keller, 2003; Schouten and McAlexander, 1995), celebrities (Thomson, 2005), and special possessions (Kleine and Baker, 2004).

The formation of emotional attachment is not the result of consumers rational thinking, but according to their past consumption experience (Schultz et al., 1989). Kim and Villegas (2009) pointed out that the higher emotional attachment will enhance the consumer a higher sense of identity to consuming products, with a high level of trust for the message provided by the firms, and also have higher motivation to buy the products of the brand. Moreover, emotional attachment is verified as having a high positive correlation with the premium of purchase, which means the higher level of emotional attachment, consumers can accept the greater increasable rate of price to the brand. Meanwhile, consumers will be keeping more long-term relationship with the brand, and not could be easily converted to other brand name products (Park et al., 2007). Based on the above discussion; emotional attachment is defined in this study as the strong and complex constellation of consumer perception from their past experience of the brand of online shopping stores.

2.2 Perceived Service fairness and Outcomes

In the context of service recovery, the customer complaining behavior is consequently arisen from consumer’s perceived unfairness of treatment during the process of service delivery (Blodgett et al., 1993, 1997; Seiders and Berry, 1998). Customer perceived unfairness is resulted from the inconsistency between customers’expectations and they perceived actual service performance. Customer dissatisfaction is normally resulted from service failure (Blodgett et al., 1993; Wolfinbarger and Gilly, 2001). Service fairness has significant influence on service satisfaction (Blodgett et al., 1997; McCollough et al., 2000; Smith et al., 1999; Tax et al,1998). Some studies focus on the consequences of service recovery fairness, including customer satisfaction,trust, commitment, word-of-mouth, purchase intention and brand loyalty (Blodgett et al., 1997; Smith et al.,1999; Maxham, 2001; Kau and Elizabeth, 2006; Tax et al., 1998).

The theoretical foundation of service fairness is based on the equity theory (Adams, 1965). The concept of service fairness has been widely applied in consumer behavior context, to examine the customers’ reactions to different conflicts in social psychology. According to Austin (1979), fairness includes not only for the service recovery outcomes, but also includes the service provided procedure and the way of implement action. Many scholars have argued that the consumer judgments of fairness are significantly positive impacted by three dimensions of distributive fairness, procedural fairness, and interactional fairness (Tax and Brown, 1998; Smith et al., 1999). Distributive fairness refers to perception of outcome fairness after resource distribution and allocation; procedural fairness refers to perception of fairness with respect to the procedure employed to produce the outcome; interactional fairness refers to perception of the information exchange attitude and the conflict resolution process through to the final outcome. It is suggested that these three dimensions of fairness are the antecedents of service recovery fairness. Therefore, service recovery fairness is a formative indicator (Carr,2007; Schoefer and Ennew, 2005). Based on the above discussion; service recovery fairness is defined in this study as the outcomes of consumer perception from their experience of online shop service recovery processing.

2.3 Trust

Chung and Kwon (2009), defined trust as a feeling of security and willingness to depend on someone or something, and it is a dynamic process of building over a certain period of time contributing to satisfaction beyond the effects of the economic outcome. Trust is a multi-faceted concept that incorporates cognitive and affective trust (Johnson and Grayson, 2005; Lewis and Weigert, 1985; Riegelsberger et al., 2003), and it is one of antecedences of emotional attachment (Grisaffe and Nguyen, 2011). In addition, trust has been identified as critical mediators that influence customers’ online purchase intention (Chau et al., 2007; Chen and Barnes, 2007; Lim, 2003; Lin, 2007). Trust is a vital key to building customer loyalty (Reichheld and Schefter, 2000). Accordingly, in this study trust is defined as a feeling of security and willingness to depend on all information and service which the online store provided, include that the well-response of service failure.

2.4 Word-of-Mouth

Word-of-mouth (WOM) refers to the informal aspect of communication, the communicator’s independence from a commercial source, and on the phenomenon of information diffusion. Thus, word-of-mouth is usually defined as an exchange flow of information, communication, or conversation between two individuals (Arndt,1967; Bone, 1992). Word-of-mouth is one of the customers’ subjective probabilities of performing a certain behavioral act. It is suggested that satisfaction is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for positive wordof-mouth, i.e., the agreed that positive feedback is always driven by satisfaction. The perceptions of fairness,emotion, and trusts have been verified as some of the most important antecedences of word-mouth (Anderson and Swaminathan, 2011).

Plenty of literature has argued that perceived fairness of a transactions is positively related to re-patronage intentions; repurchase intention and brand loyalty (Smith et al. 1999; Chebata and Slusarczykb, 2005; Tax et al., 1998). However, very few studies have discussed about the relationship between perceived fairness and word-of-mouth again, but many studies in service recovery context support that a good service recovery will result in positive word-of-mouth, and perceived fairness, which is one of the most core components to the formation of service recover judgment (Tax et al., 1998; Carr, 2007; Maxham, 2001). Namkung and Jang(2010) have examined the effects of perceived service fairness on emotions and behavioral intentions in the restaurant context; they proposed word-of-mouth is a consequential actual behavior of customers’ perceived service fairness (i.e., behavioral intention).

Word-of-mouth is also affected positively by emotional intentions (i.e., happiness-related emotions, such as happiness, joy, and pride and sadness-related emotions, such as disappointment, anger, and frustration);however, direction of influences has not been determined. Therefore, the relationship between perceived fairness and word-of-mouth is subject to further validation. According to the statement of Blodgett et al. (1993;1997), people who have positive fairness perception toward service recovery would have positive emotions and these emotional experiences may lead to a positive word-of-mouth. In this study, word-of-mouth is defined that after the service recovery, the positive words of consumers spreading.

2.5 Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty has always been one of the important indicators in the marketing field. Jacoby and Olson (1970)consider that brand loyalty is a non-random behavioral response and exist long-term, which the formation of a psychologically specific commitment to the brand is based on the purchase decision process of evaluating one or more different brands. Most scholars agree that brand loyalty is a composite index of psychological and behavior concepts. The formation of behavior loyalty will be resulted when consumers repeat to purchase the same brand, and the specific brand preferences psychological commitment to support the formation of attitudinal loyalty. A psychological commitment is resulted that the customer considers that a particular brand can provide some unique value, and customer commitment to maintain the long-term relationships with a particular brand or company, and ultimately reflected in their attitude and behavior (Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2001;Jones and Taylor, 2007). A true brand loyalty of consumers will have not only the mental commitment, but the more have the actual purchase behavior (Bandyopadhyay and Martell, 2007). The formation of customer loyalty is the interaction of “attitudinal loyalty" and "behavioral loyalty” (Rowley and Dawes, 2000). Based on the above discussion; brand loyalty is defined in this study as the outcomes of consumer perception from their experience of online shop service recovery processing.

Research Hypotheses

Based on the above literature, the following hypotheses of this study are posited:

H1: Trust has positive influence on service recovery fairness.

H2: Trust has positive influence on brand loyalty.

H3: Distributive fairness has positive influence on service recovery fairness.

H4: Procedural fairness has positive influence on service recovery fairness.

H5: Interactional fairness has positive influence on service recovery fairness.

H6: Service Recovery Fairness has positive influence on word-of-mouth.

H7: Word-of-mouth has positive influence on brand loyalty.

H8: Service Recovery Fairness has positive influence on brand loyalty.

3 Research Methodology

The primary aim of this current study is to empirically identify the inter-relationships among perceived service recovery fairness, customer-brand identification, brand personality, repurchase intention, and the moderating effect of emotional attachment. A comprehensive research model is developed to integrating the above phenomenon. The research model will be evaluated through data collected from scholars with their findings and researches. A Meta was adopted to empirically test the developed research hypotheses. The research framework of this study is shown in the Figure 1.

4 Research Analyses and Results

The research collects data from publications in journals, books, and master thesis sources. After filtering the collected sources, twenty four studies were qualified for the Meta methods, those derived from seventeen international academic journals and master thesis which were downloaded from ProQuest, Sage, Emerald Insight, Google Scholar, JStor, Willey Online Library, Science Direct, and so forth. Although the research samples are relatively not large enough, those are fully reliable, empirical and in line with the targeted researching subjective of the finding.

Meta-analysis is the statistical procedure for combining data from multiple studies. When the treatment effect (or effect size) is consistent from one study to the next, meta-analysis can be used to identify this common effect. When the effect varies from one study to the next, meta-analysis may be used to identify the reason for the variation

Meta- analysis technique. Table 1 shows the studies which included in the meta- analysis. This meta- analysis evaluates fours relationships including: the relationship between trust and service recovery fairness; the relationship between service recovery fairness and word of mouth; the relationship between trust and brand Loyalty.

There are 8 (eight) hypotheses with 7 (seven) variables in 24 studies. The sample size of each hyptheses is vary. The highest number is 1,943 samples and the lowest is 759 samples. Table 2 shows the results of metaanalysis of each hypothesis in examining the effect of emotion to the online shopping Stores service recovery.

Based on the table 2, it can be seen that each hypothesis has its own value correlation through Meta analysis.

H1: Trust has positive influence on service recovery fairness.

Fig.1. The research framework of this study

Table 1 Studies Alphabetically by Source and Codes for Hypotheses Tests

The purpose of the Hypothesis 1 is to evaluate the relation between trust and service recovery fairness.There is a correlation (r= 0.328) so it has a medium effect between trust and recovery fairness. The index of heterogeneity (I2= 89.86%) shows that this hypothesis has highly heterogeneity. In addition, Q-value is higher than chi-square and p-value ( p=0.000) ＜ 0.05 it means that the subset of effect size is highly heterogeneous. Therefore, H1 is supported and it can be concluded that trust has positive influence on service recovery fairness.

Table 2 Results of Meta-Analysis: Examining the effect of emotion to the online shopping Stores service recovery

H2: Trust has positive influence on brand loyalty.

Hypothesis 2 examines the effect between trust and brand loyalty. There is a correlation (r = 0.182) so it has a medium effect between trust and brand loyalty. The index of heterogeneity (I2 = 97.28%) shows that this hypothesis has highly heterogeneity. Besides that, Q-value is higher than chi-square andp-value (p=0.000) ＜ 0.05 it means that the subset of effect size is also highly heterogeneous. Therefore, H2 is supported and it can come up with a conclusion that trust has positive influence on brand loyalty.

H3: Distributive fairness has positive influence on service recovery fairness.

Hypothesis 3 evaluates the effect between Distribution Fairness and Service recovery fairness. There is a correlation (r = 0.170) so it has a medium effect between Distribution Fairness and Service recovery fairness.The index of heterogeneity (I2 = 93.69%) shows that this hypothesis has highly heterogeneity. Besides that,Q-value is higher than chi-square andp-value (p= 0.000) ＜ 0.05 it means that the subset of effect size is also highly heterogeneous. Therefore, H3 is supported and it can be understood that Distribution Fairness has positive influence on Service recovery fairness.

H4: Procedural fairness has positive influence on service recovery fairness.

Hypothesis 4 focuses on the effect between Procedural Fairness and Service recovery fairness. There is a correlation (r = 0.128) so it has a medium effect between Procedural Fairness and Service recovery fairness.The index of heterogeneity (I2= 89.83%) shows that this hypothesis has highly heterogeneity. Besides that,Q-value is higher than chi-square andp-value (p= 0.000) ＜ 0.05 it means that the subset of effect size is also highly heterogeneous. Therefore, H4 is supported and it can bring a close that Procedural Fairness has positive influence on Service recovery fairness.

H5: Interactional fairness has positive influence on service recovery fairness.

Hypothesis 5 underlines the effect between Interactional Fairness and Service recovery fairness. There is a correlation (r= 0.684) so it has a high effect between Interactional Fairness and Service recovery fairness. The index of heterogeneity (I2= 99.51%) shows that this hypothesis has highly heterogeneity. Besides that, Q-value is higher than chi-square andp-value (p=0.000) ＜ 0.05 it means that the subset of effect size is also highly heterogeneous. Therefore, H5 is fully supported and it can bring about a fact that Interactional Fairness has positive influence on Service recovery fairness.

H6: Service Recovery Fairness has positive influence on word-of-mouth.

Hypothesis 6 examines the effect between Service recovery fairness and word of mouth. There is a correlation (r = 0.279) so it has a medium effect between Service recovery fairness and word of mouth. The index of heterogeneity (I2= 97.22%) shows that this hypothesis has highly heterogeneity. Besides that, Q-value is higher than chi-square andp-value (p=0.000) ＜ 0.05 it means that the subset of effect size is also highly het-erogeneous. Therefore, H6 is accepted and it can be said that Service recovery fairness has positive influence on word of mouth.

H7: Word-of-mouth has positive influence on brand loyalty.

Hypothesis 7 evaluates the effect between word of mouth and brand loyalty. There is a correlation (r =0.374) so it has a medium effect between word of mouth and brand loyalty. The index of heterogeneity (I2 =94.38%) shows that this hypothesis has highly heterogeneity. Besides that, Q-value is higher than chi-square andp-value (p=0.000) ＜ 0.05 it means that the subset of effect size is also highly heterogeneous. Therefore,H7 is accepted and resulted in an outcome that word of mouth has positive influence on brand loyalty.

H8: Service Recovery Fairness has positive influence on brand loyalty

Hypothesis 8 figures out the effect between Service recovery fairness and brand loyalty. There is a correlation (r = 0.170) so it has a medium effect between Service recovery fairness and brand loyalty. The index of heterogeneity (I2 = 0%) shows that this hypothesis has no heterogeneity. Besides that, chi-square is higher than Q-value andp-value (p= 0.442) ＞0.05 it means that the subset of effect size is low heterogeneous.Therefore, H8 is not accepted and it can be said that Service recovery fairness has not positive influence on brand loyalty.

5 Conclusion

The purpose of this meta-analysis study is to evaluate the emotion to the online shopping stores’ service recovery through identifying the inter-relationship among perceived service recovery fairness, customer-brand identification, brand personality and repurchase intention. Based on that, there are 8 hypotheses are given to assess and several conclusions are found out in this study.

Firstly, trust has positive influence on service recovery fairness; this result is consistent with previous studies by Chenet et al. (2008), Lau et al. (1999), and Back and Parks (2003. Service recovery fairness could help to reinstall the trust of customers on the service provider.

Secondly, satisfaction with service recovery also leads to positive word-of-mouth behavior. This finding is consistent with that discovered by James (2008) and Fernandes (2008). Yu-Jia Hu (2011) supported that positive word-of-mouth not only helps to attract new customers but also assists in the creation of positive image about the firm concerned. Satisfaction with service recovery also reinforces consumer loyalty and commitment. However, the extent of the impact of satisfaction on loyalty is found to be not as strong as that on trust and word-of-mouth behavior. This could be due to factors other than satisfaction with service recovery,

Thirdly, there are positive influence between three elements of perceived justice (compose of Procedural fairness, Interactional fairness and Distributive fairness) and service recovery fairness. This finding based on Carr (2007) and Kuo and Wu (2011). However, the impact of Distributive fairness on recovery satisfaction appears to be stronger than Procedural fairness or Interactional fairness. The ultimate goal of service recovery is not limited to preventing the loss of customers, but rather to maintain a long-term cooperative relationship with customers. Our findings, then, will be useful to hotel managers for developing procedures that maximize the customer satisfaction with service recovery and subsequently augment long-term customer relationships,which is consistent with the previous findings of Kim et al. (2009).

The fourth is an important antecedent role for customer loyalty in the management of service recovery.Both procedural and distributive fairnesses in recovery had stronger influences on subsequent reactions of customers with higher levels of loyalty prior to the service failure. Satisfaction of customers is dependent on the degree to which managers of services are aware of, and can meet the conditions of the psychological contracts they hold with the business (Robbins et al. 2004)

According to Hoffman and Kelley (2000), Tax and Brown (1998), any practical way to improve management in the event of a service failure should have significant implications for the organization. Business strategies that maximize these benefits while also exploiting the retention-loyalty-profitability linkage should have significant returns for the service firms. To this end, when developing recovery strategies, managers should pay particular attention to ensuring perceptions of fairness in the event that failures are experienced by loyal customers.

The next finding based on Cui (2011), Clark et al. (2012) and Rezvani (2012) realized that the word of mouth has positive influence on brand loyalty. In order to create the brand equity in terms of increasing brand awareness and brand image.

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