How to Lessen Customer Infringement and Retaliation in the Retail Environment and Increase Identity Loyalty

In this series, I invite scholars from the consumer behavior field to discuss the latest cutting edge research that they publish in our #1 Journal of Consumer Research.

For this episode Barbara Kahn (my co-host of Marketing Matters) and I talk to Professor Joann Peck.

Problem: Losing customers is a big deal. The Starbucks effect. You need a customer experience that deeply connects with your customers (think good will in the bank for when the company slips up). If you don't understand this principal you may inadvertently create "customer infringement" and may result in customer retaliatory behaviors that are negatively related to strengthening the customer experience.

Solution: Professor Peck discusses how to train employees to help customers develop a sense of psychological ownership and in turn fend off customer territorial and retaliatory behaviors between customers and store employees and even other customers. Her experiments are really cool and show the same basic findings.

Data: Here's an example

Note In this study, participants thought they were designing a children's folder to hold educational supplies for a non-profit. They were either told to "copy a design for the folder" (Low psychological ownership, X axis) or "customize their own" (High psychological ownership, X axis). When the volunteer (confederate) took the folder, the volunteer said "that looks like a design I made" (Signal--Black Bars) versus not saying anything (No signal--grey bars).

Findings: The highest level of infringement perceptions occur when there is high psychological ownership AND there is a signal that the volunteer is intruding on the participants ownership of the folder design. The most interesting outcomes of this highest black bar on the right hand side of the panel is that in this condition you saw the highest likelihood of [1] not helping the non-profit volunteer (when they "unknowingly" dropped a pen), [2] higher negative evaluations of the volunteer [3] less desire to design another folder, [4] lower word of mouth for the non-profit, [5] lower desire to donate money to the non-profit.

Conclusion: In the retail environment, the opposite of these behaviors are likely to strengthen the customer experience and the connection between the brand, service, organization and the consumer. The conduit is employees (and to a lesser degree other consumers). Create an environment that fosters psychological ownership and that will in turn mitigate customer infringement and customer retaliatory behaviors.

For those more interested in diving into more details, have a listen to our Pod Cast. Here is the citation for the original research:

Colleen P Kirk, Joann Peck, Scott D Swain; Property Lines in the Mind: Consumers’ Psychological Ownership and Their Territorial Responses, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 45, Issue 1, 1 June 2018, Pages 148–168