The Impact Of Consumer Cynicism On Customer Compliant Behavior In The Context Of Relationship Investment

In recent years,service companies have focused more on relationship investment behaviors to build their core competitiveness.From the perspective of the enterprise,extant research explores how the relationship investment behavior creates profits for the enterprise,enhances customer satisfaction and customer loyalty,but ignores the consumer-level relationship investment cognitive behavior and the resulting customer behavior response.At the same time,there is relatively little research on the intermediate mechanism between relationship investment and customer complaints.Taken the automobile service industry as the background,this study discusses the impact of consumer cynicism on customer negative word of mouth and customer brand switching in the context of relationship investment from the perspective of customers,and also considers the possible moderating role of customer entitlement.In this study,a 2 × 2 experimental method was used to set up specific experimental scenarios and present them in the form of questionnaires.Field surveys and interviews with major automobile service dealers in Wuhan resulted in a total of 320 valid questionnaires.Using AMOS 20.0 and SPSS 22.0 to analyze data,the following conclusions are drew:(1)the goal incongruence of customer perceived relationship investment has a significant positive impact on both negative word of mouth and brand switching;(2)the value incongruence of customer perceived relationship investment has a significant positive impact on both negative word of mouth and brand switching;(3)consumer cynicism has a significant positive impact on negative word of mouth and brand switching;(4)consumer cynicism has a partial mediating effect on the influence of incongruence goal perception and value perception on negative word of mouth and brand switching.(5)customer entitlement positively moderates the effect of consumer cynicism on negative word of mouth,while has no significant moderating effect in the influence of consumer cynicism on brand switching.This research breaks through the limitations of previous research to explore the positive significance of relationship investment from the perspective of enterprises,focus on the potential negative impact of the main cognitive factors of the customer on the relationship investment to the relationship performance,provides a certain reference for Chinese services companies to implement relationship marketing strategies.