Overview

• Purpose
Explore the basic psychological needs
• Approach
Use of two focus groups, four customer needs emerged.
• Findings
Different needs are indeed more important in one type of service than another
• Limitations
 Future research should validate the existence of the four needs
• Originality
First of its kind to empirically explore customers’ psychological needs
Introduction
• Services comprise approximately 66-80 percent of the national
economy (Iacobucci, 1998)
• Customer expectations.
• Focused dimensions of service delivery
• Needs only studied in marketing perspectives
• Target customers’ psychographics and values with an eye to
marketing a certain product
Needs and expectations
• According to Schneider and Bowen
(1995), expectations tend to be more
conscious, accessible, and specific.
• Expectations concern daily events.
• Customers react to violations of
expectations with disappointment
• Needs tend to be more unconscious,
reside deeper in the psyche and are more
global
• Needs concern long-term existence and
identity issues
• Customers often react to violations of
needs with anger or even outrage
• Sheth et al. (1991) propose a list of five
needs (functional, social, emotional,
epistemic, and situational)
• Hanna (1980) (physical safety, material
security, material comfort, acceptance by
others, recognition from others, influence over
others, and personal growth)
Needs
• They adopted the Schneider and Bowen (1995) model of three needs.
the need for security
 the need for self-esteem
 the need for justice.
• Reasons
They are specific to service businesses
They cover many of the needs proposed by marketing scholars
They come from a management and psychological perspective.
Security need
• To feel secure and unthreatened by physical, psychological, or economic harm in
the service transaction.
• Often concerns life and death issues – both figuratively and literally
• For example, security needs can be an important issue in terms of physical safety
such as when one flies on an airplane or stays at a hotel.
• Prevail in a psychological sense when it comes to health and life insurance
policies
• It also deal with economic safety
• For example banks, stock brokers, mortgage companies, credit card companies
The esteem need
• one’s self-esteem or self-worth maintained and enhanced
• Two types of self-esteem needs (Franks and Marolla, 1976).
• Inner-directed needs which are based on the individual’s own feelings
of efficacy and competence
• outer-directed needs which are based on the reflected appraisals
from others in one’s social environment in the form of social approval,
attention, recognition, respect, prestige, and status
• For example, a service may fail to recognize and acknowledge the
reality of a customer’s dissatisfaction or may creating conditions that
make the customer feel stupid.
The justice need
• It is the need to be treated in a fair and equitable way compared to other similar customers.
• Three kinds of justice perceptions in the service encounter, (Tax et al., 1988)
1. Distributive justice – the perception that they are receiving similar outcomes as another
comparable customer
 Example: One customer receives a free drink and other a round trip
2. Procedural justice – the perception that procedures for comparable customers are fair and
equitable
 Example: when two comparable customers experience different procedures for complaint
resolution.
3. Interactional justice – the perception that they are treated in an interpersonally fair way.
 For example, one customer is spoken to in a courteous, pleasant manner during the service
transaction (e.g. checking out of a hotel) while another is spoken to in a rude, matter-of-fact
manner
Purposes
• Exploring the basic human needs that customers have in the service
encounter (Are there three or more?); .
• Examining whether different categories of needs are more important
for one industry than another
• Investigating whether there are gender or racioethnic differences in
perceived importance of needs in each industry
• Determining whether certain service industries have a higher level of
needs overall than other industries