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Potential effects of psychological reactant consumers on relationships marketing programmes
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Abstract
This conceptual article presents the current criticisms to relationship marketing and important concepts developed in the psychology to understand consumer reactance toward services packaged as formal contracts. A first part presents the numerous questions that researches are raising about the willingness of people to commit to services. A second part shows that psychological reactance, already studied in the context of non product choice, is an interesting concept to revisit the relationship marketing paradigm: are all customers willing to commit to a service or are they forced against their own freedom? The last section develops an integrative conceptual framework of the different concepts introduced in this research.Psychological reactance; relationship marketing; long term commitment; relationship orientation