Commitment To The Applicability Of Research Based On Consumer Response Service

Service guarantee is seen as an effective marketing tool for companies to establish competitive advantages and increase market share. It can help companies to improve service quality and attract more customers. On the other hand, negative impacts, such as burden of cost caused by compensation and investment on business operation, must be well considered before a company conducts a service guarantee. Some scholars have begun questioning the effects of service guarantees, arguing that companies cannot always consider service guarantees helpful but soberly see it as a double-edged sword.Owing to the two-side impacts, managers must pay more attention to whether their companies ought to launch a service guarantee and how they can maximize service guarantees' positive effects. Hence, this paper has analyzed how two factors, which are corporate reputation and industry coverage of service guarantee, act on the effectiveness of service guarantees based on the response of customers. By a situational simulation experiments on the industry of China's travel service, we have found:Firstly, in the condition of providing service guarantees, customers tend to think the motivation of launching a service guarantee positive on a high reputation company, while judge the motivation negative on a low reputation company. In the condition of not providing service guarantees, no matter whether companies provide service guarantees or not, the difference of customers' judgments on these companies' motivation are not significant.Secondly, this paper has found that service guarantees are always effective on four aspects (four dependent variables), including reducing customers' perceived risks, enhancing consumer confidence, improving customers' expectation of service quality, and stimulating customers' purchase intention, no matter how corporate reputation is. While corporate reputation does significantly affect the effectiveness (reducing perceived risks, enhancing consumer confidence) of service guarantees. In terms of reducing customers' perceived risks, companies with low reputation can be more significantly affected by service guarantees than those with high corporate reputation. Regarding the dependent variable of enhancing consumer confidence, also companies with low reputation achieve better effects. Finally, in the condition of high industry coverage of service guarantees, the effectiveness (reducing customers' perceived risks, enhancing consumer confidence, improving customers' expectation of service quality) of service guarantees conducted by low-reputation companies is significant while high-reputation companies' effectiveness is insignificant. In the condition of low industry coverage, no matter whether the corporate reputation is good or not, the effectiveness of service guarantees is always significant.The findings can provide China's companies a theoretical basis when they need to make decisions whether or not to launch a service guarantee or when they ought to launch it.First of all, we suggest that the companies without a high reputation ought to actively consider launching a service guarantee to reduce customers' perceived risks and stimulate purchase intention regardless of the industry coverage.The next, although customers tend to judge the motivation of launching a service guarantee positive on a high reputation company, service guarantees cannot actually benefit the company when the industry coverage of service guarantees is high. Hence, in the condition of high industry coverage, it is unnecessary to conduct a service guarantee for a good reputation company due to the burden of compensation cost and additional operation cost.Furthermore, companies need a service guarantee to send a signal of high service quality to customers at the initial stage and quick development stage. With the good reputation formed, the "cost performance" of service guarantees usually goes down. Managers ought to reasonably adjust or revoke the policy of service guarantee according to the real situation of industry coverage.