The effects of music, wait-length evaluation, and mood on a low-cost wait experience
Introduction
Understanding the customer's experience of waiting is an important goal for service marketers. However, not all waits are created equal. Research has shown, for example, that the effects of a delay can vary according to whether the delay occurs before a service experience, during a service experience, or after a service experience (Dubé-Rioux et al., 1989). Another factor that may affect the strength of the influence of a delay on customer evaluations of an organization is the cost to the customer of having to wait. These waiting costs could include financial costs, opportunity costs, and social/emotional costs (Houston et al., 1998). A high-cost wait situation is one that would cause the customer considerable financial, opportunity, or social/emotional cost. An example of a high-cost wait might be an airline delay that may cause a customer to miss a connecting flight. A low-cost wait situation is one that may be irritating to the customer, but does not have the financial, opportunity or social/emotional cost of a high-cost wait. An example of a low-cost wait might be standing in line at the supermarket. Many delays that customers experience over the course of a day are likely to be low-cost waits. In a competitive environment, even low-cost waits (or a series of low-cost waits in the same firm experienced over time) may negatively affect customer satisfaction with an organization.
While waiting time research has implicitly assumed customers incur high waiting costs during service delays, few studies have explicitly measured customer perceptions of these costs. Furthermore, previous researchers tended to measure waits in terms of actual or respondent-estimated wait times (e.g., Hui and Tse, 1996, Hui et al., 1997). However, the cost to a consumer of having to wait may not necessarily be related to the actual length of a wait: it may be more a function of the person–situation nature of waiting costs (e.g., some people are willing to trade their seats on an overbooked flight and others abandon their grocery carts). Therefore, measuring wait perceptions in terms of minutes and seconds is unlikely to totally capture the effects of waiting on consumers.
Exploring ways to make the wait experience seem shorter, a number of prior studies have focused on how music influences cognitions related to waiting, such as perceived waiting duration (e.g., Kellaris and Altsech, 1992, Kellaris and Kent, 1992, Hui et al., 1997). However, wait duration perceptions have not always been found to affect service evaluations Hui and Tse, 1996, Hui et al., 1997. Music can also influence mood (e.g., Bruner, 1990, Fried and Berkowitz, 1979) and mood has been found to mediate the relationship between a service waiting experience and customers' evaluations of the service organization Baker and Cameron, 1996, Houston et al., 1998, Hui and Tse, 1996, Hui et al., 1998, Taylor, 1994. Therefore, during a wait experience (particularly a low-cost wait experience, as we will argue later), music may affect customers' service evaluations through mood.
Little research has investigated the linkages between music, mood, and service evaluation. One exception is a recent study by Hui et al. (1997), which explored the effects of music valence on subjects' reactions to a preprocess wait (that appeared to be low-cost; however, wait cost was not measured) in a video-simulated service setting. The study reported here tests a similar model, but differs in the following ways: (1) we explicitly measure subjects' perceptions of wait cost, (2) the wait is longer in time (10 vs. 4 minutes), (3) waiting occurs during the in-process stage of the experience rather than in the preprocess stage, (4) subjects experience an actual wait within a physical setting, rather than a video-simulated setting, (5) we measure subjects' evaluations of the wait as long or short rather than ask them to estimate actual time duration, (6) we measure general mood of the subjects rather than measuring their affective reaction to the delay because the latter may be subject to demand bias, and (7) we measure subjects' responses to the music rather than manipulate music characteristics.
The purposes of our study are to examine the affective and cognitive roles of music and to explore the role that mood plays relative to that of wait-length evaluation in a low-cost waiting experience. The following section develops the theoretical foundation for our hypotheses. We then describe the study method and results, followed by a discussion of the findings.
Section snippets
The conceptual model and hypotheses
Subjective perception of time has been considered important in understanding consumer responses to delays (e.g., Hui and Tse, 1996, Hui et al., 1997, Hornik, 1984, Hornik, 1992). How long a wait seems (vs. how long a wait actually is) is determined in part by the length of the actual wait time. Many individual and environmental elements within the organization's physical setting may also contribute to an individual's perception of the length of the wait (Baker and Cameron, 1996). One factor
Method
Because service businesses are generally reluctant to create irritating situations for their customers by making them wait, we chose a laboratory study over a field study to test the proposed model. Additionally, we wanted to control the length of the wait, which would have been difficult, if not impossible, in a real service firm. Thus, our objective for this study was to design an experience that simulated a waiting situation in a service organization.
A service encounter is an experience that
Discussion
Our research provides an important contribution to the marketing literature on service delays because we explicitly measured subjects' perceptions of the cost of the wait. In the low-cost waiting context of our study, music was found to exhibit both cognitive (on wait-length evaluation) and affective (on mood) influences. However, music's positive contribution to overall experience evaluation appears to be through mood and not through wait-length evaluation.
Wait-length evaluation was not a
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