Does Good Service Recovery Improve Consumer Affinity?

Abstract

Increasing cross cultural contacts elicit a new breed of consumers with favourable attitudes toward foreign countries, or consumer affinity. Unlike its growing popularity in international marketing, its antecedents have been relatively neglected particularly in terms of quantitative investigations. In this study, we focus on service recovery in intercultural service encounters as one of the leading antecedents of consumer affinity and investigate whether appropriate service recovery increases consumer affinity for the country to which the employee belongs to, introducing consumer animosity as a moderating factor between them. The results of simple slope analysis revealed that service recovery has a positive effect on consumer affinity only when consumer animosity is low; when consumer animosity is high, it does not elicit consumer affinity. Hence, service providers can increase consumers’ affinity through good service recovery if low consumer animosity is observed. This research presents a new theoretical implication for service recovery in intercultural service encounters by incorporating the concepts of two different types of country biases into service marketing.