How Gifts Influence Relationships With Service Customers and Financial Outcomes for Firms
通过一项航空公司的纵向现场实验，研究了不同礼物设计对客户感知和实际消费行为的影响，发现经济相关与社会无关的礼物组合最能提升客户关系投资感知，并完全通过感知关系投资和再购意愿影响客户支出。
Service companies invest billions of dollars to develop and maintain long-term customer relationships by offering corporate gifts. Yet several questions remain regarding such relationship marketing instruments: What impact do different kinds of gifts have on customers? Which perceptions allow gifts to affect customer behavior? What financial outcomes do these gifts imply for firms? To answer these questions, the authors use data from 1,950 airline customers—combining a longitudinal field experiment with internal customer database information—and explore the effects of different gift designs on customer perceptions and actual spending behavior. The experiment manipulates four gift designs (economic related/unrelated; social related/unrelated) and measures customer perceptions and behavior at different points in time. Multivariate analyses of covariance (MANCOVAs) and spotlight analyses reveal that the congruent combinations of economic related and social unrelated gift dimensions have the strongest effects on customer perceptions of relationship investment. Serial mediation analyses further reveal that the impact of gifts on customer spending is fully mediated by customer perceptions of perceived relationship investment and repurchase intention. Economic related gifts produce the highest contribution margins. Service managers may use these findings to design effective gifts and management processes (e.g., gift success tracking).