Empirical Research Of Consumption Emotions As A Mediator Between Service Quality And Behavioral Intention In Catering Industry

The competitions between service firm businesses are becoming increasingly tense, as the service industry make phenomenal progress in the modern life. At the same time, along with increasing demand from the service firm, the consumers think a lot of high-quality consumption experience and emotional experience brought from the high-quality service level more than ever before. Accordingly, A large number of academics and service industry operators are paying more attention to the marketing of the service commodity and research on consumer behavior. As an important direction of service marketing, service quality and consumers'behavioral intention have always been well received by the concerns of academia. Because of the different perspective of study and choice of subjects, rich research result are failed to reach a unified understanding. Some scholars believe that service quality has a direct impact on consumers'behavioral intention, while other scholars believe that this influence is indirect, which depend on a kind of intermediary variable to transition. As a result, many intermediate variables were introduced into the model, but few efforts have been made to examine emotion's intermediary role between service quality and behavioral intention. The effect of emotion has gained more and more attention in recent consuming and marketing research. Plenty of researches have shown that emotion would influent the cognitive process of consumer decision, in return influent consumers'assessment, satisfaction of the products and consumers'behavioral intention, such as repurchase intention.This article chooses catering industry as subject of our study. We try to summarize and analyze the literature related to service quality, emotions and behavioral intention from different countries at the beginning of our study. Based on a large number of literatures analyzing, we introduced emotions as the intermediate variable to study its intermediary role between service quality and behavioral intention and constructed the theoretical model in catering industry. The following hypotheses are presented and tested: service quality has a positive impact on behavioral intention; service quality has a positive impact on consumption emotions; consumption emotions have a positive impact on behavioral intention; service quality has a positive impact on behavioral intention through consumption emotions. In order to test those hypotheses, our study takes the catering industry in Changchun as the research background; we get 205 samples through convenience sampling. The test of reliability and validity for all scales that we used, show that all scales have certain reliability and validity, and the variable could be measured effectively. The descriptive analysis showed that the sample has a good representation for the population. So this research used SPSS15.0 statistical software to analyze the survey data, and came to the following conclusions:First, service quality has a direct positive impact on behavioral intention in catering industry. Although scholars are agued about the mechanism, the impact of service quality on behavioral intention is significant in catering industry. In view of the argument of weather there is a direct impact between service quality and behavioral intention ,this article have achieved the conclusion that service quality has a significant positive impact on behavioral intention.Second, service quality has a significant positive impact on consumption emotions. This indict that service quality is the cause of emotions, and the higher service quality level consumer perceived, the higher positive emotions level consumer have. The results of the study are consistent with some cross research.Third, consumption emotions have a significant positive impact on behavioral intention. That is the higher positive emotions level consumer have, the higher recommended intention and repurchase intention level will be. The service industry should give enough attention to consumption emotions. In addition, mean test of emotions show that there is much room for improvement of consumption emotions level and the restaurant can make effort on the aspect of mobilizing consumers'emotions.Fourth, consumption emotions perform a intermediary role between service quality and behavioral intention, namely service quality has a positive impact on behavioral intention, there is not only a direct impact but also a indirect impact through consumption emotions. This result is consistent with Oliver's (1993) conclusions, which is consumption experience may stimulate emotions and affect consumption reaction. Tai&Fung (1997) also considered the stimulation come from the service is directly proportional with the emotions consumers had experience in the store, which will positively affect the after-purchase behavior.This study is beneficial complement about the research of consumption emotions and can also provide useful guidance to marketing activity of catering industry. As a result, this study has great theoretic and practical significance, not only for academic, but also for marketing practice of enterprise.In the end, this article proposed several suggestions for future research base on its limitations:First, we use convenience sampling method in this paper and most of the samples are from university students, which obviously have an impact on the representativeness of study results. For this reason, future research should expand the sample size and do the investigation among ordinary consumers who are more representative with random sampling method.Second, there are many other factors affect behavioral intention should be included into the model, as a result of this research failed to take them into account. Like many scholars have showed in their research consumer satisfaction and consumer loyalty are important variables can affect behavioral intention. So what are the influences of these variables on our model and what are the positions of these variables in our model can be explored in the future research.Third,negative emotions can be included into this model in the future since we have only selected positive emotions in our research. The extension of the model can help us to do more in-depth study of consumer behavior.