The Impact Of Ethical Signs On Consumer Ethical Behavior And Customer Satisfaction

Consumer misbehavior exists in various forms and is also pervasive in retail industry. According to the statistics, consumer misbehavior costs several billion pounds to the retail companies each year, apart from these costs could estimated by money, there are lots of injures caught by consumer misbehavior, such as psychical and physical hurts, which are not able to estimate by money directly. The introduction part of this thesis exhibit the varieties of consumer misbehavior and those negative influences on retail performances and profits in detail, and then propose that emphasis should be paid in this area. The focus of this thesis is study on the routine constraint measures, such as ethical signs, in order to find whether the ethical signs we usually use are effective, and what kind of ethical signs will effectively control the consumer misbehavior.In the part of literature review, the conclusions are made on the current study focus of the consumer misbehavior, such as the concrete manifestation of consumer misbehavior, the causes of misbehavior, its typology, how to control misbehavior, and introduce the achievements have made in this field. This study proposes ten hypotheses according to the literature and interview.The main study of this thesis included two experiment studies. The first one is to test whether the ethical signs will effect the ethical behavior intention and customer satisfaction. The second experiment used 2*2*2 between group experiment designs. Simulation experiment was used for the second experiment study; eight groups were divided in the principle of random assignment. There are about 25 participants in each group who are asked to watch a PPT which was designed according to the everyday rules. After watching the PPT, each participant needed to answer a questionnaire including 13 close end questions. Finally, we got several inclusions as follows:First, ethical signs affect the consumer ethical behavior intention and consumer satisfaction significantly.Second, participants exposure in ethical signs written in softness tone compared to the ones written in crudeness tone, have stronger consumer ethical behavior intention and consumer satisfaction.Third, there is stronger control effect when ethical signs are laid on shelf than they are laid on the entrance of the mall.Forth, there is stronger control effect when ethical signs appear in middle-small sized shopping mall than they appear in large scaled department store.Fifth, there will be lower consumer satisfaction when the ethical signs appear in the large scaled department store.