Hedonic and utilitarian failures in online consumer
reviews of video games
Master thesis
Student name: Roy Stoop Student number: 5877431
Study: MSc Business Administration - Marketing Track Institution: University of Amsterdam (UvA)
Supervisor: dr. F.B. (Frederik) Situmeang
2
Statement of Originality
This document is written by Student Roy Stoop who declares to take full responsibility for the contents of this document.
I declare that the text and the work presented in this document is original and that no sources other than those mentioned in the text and its references have been used in creating it. The Faculty of Economics and Business is responsible solely for the supervision of completion of the work, not for the contents.
3
Background
My interest for video games has been reinforced after seeing the movie Video Games: The Movie (2014). This film starts off by interviewing some video game industry professionals and what they think video games might achieve in the future. However, more catchy was their first phrase they started off with, a quote from Mahatma Gandhi,
“A small body of undetermined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the courses of history.”
This quote set the tone for the entire film and more important, it inspired me in writing my thesis. Also, I would like to thank my supervisor Frederik Situmeang for his endless support and faith to finish my thesis.
Amsterdam, 24th June 2016 Roy Stoop
4
Abstract
Purpose: The impact of failures in consumer reviews of video games have been undiscussed
in the current literature so far. Although research has been done on failures in the service industries, these have not been applied to the video game market yet. This study will provide more insights into consumer behaviour, customer values and sales determinants of video games.
Proposition: This study will investigate the relationship between hedonic and utilitarian
failures and the sales of a video game sequel. It is expected that failures have a negative impact on the sales of the sequel, whereby community strength and product improvement may moderate this effect.
Methodology: The research questions have been tested by analysing the content of online
user and expert reviews of 1107 video games from the website Metacritic.com, whereby simple regression analysis has been used to test the hypotheses.
Findings: The results show that both hedonic and utilitarian failures will have a negative
impact on sales. However, when the size of the community or the community strength plays a moderating role, it seems that community strength positively influences sales when there are utilitarian failures, rather than hedonic failures. The same applies for the moderating role of product improvement, as it has a positive impact on sales when there are utilitarian failures, but not when there are hedonic failures.
5
Content
Background ... 3 Abstract ... 4 Content ... 5 1. Introduction ... 6 2. Literature Review ... 101. The video game market ... 10
2. Word-of-mouth marketing and the impact of consumer reviews ... 12
3. Community strength and the impact of negative reviews ... 16
4. Service failures ... 18
5. Linking service failures to customer values ... 21
6. Service recovery ... 26 3. Conceptual framework ... 30 4. Methodology ... 31 Introduction ... 31 Description of sample ... 32 Variables ... 34
Hedonic and utilitarian failures ... 34
Moderators community strength and product improvement ... 35
Sales of the video game... 36
Data analysis ... 36
5. Results ... 37
Descriptive statistics ... 37
Test of the hypotheses ... 38
Determinants of the sales of video games ... 38
Moderating effect of community strength ... 39
Moderating effect of product improvement ... 41
6. Discussion ... 43
Summary ... 43
Theoretical implications ... 45
Managerial implications ... 46
Limitations and future research ... 47
7. References ... 48
6
1. Introduction
Video games have become part of our culture. Moreover, even when people die, video games continue existing and will evolve over time. In the last decade, it has become a billion dollar industry, it has grown extremely and it has even far-out surpassed the music and movie industry. It seems like games will never disappear from our society (Zhuang et al., 2013).
Organizations in every kind of industry are challenged by more intense competition and customer service pressures than ever before. Switching costs for consumers have reached a minimum, and the market has become very transparent, mainly due to technological
developments. An example is the technological development of the Internet, during shopping online, when you are one click away from another provider for the product or service you are looking for. As a result of these possibilities, risks have arisen for companies and these risks will lead to extra attention for preventing failures and adapting extra cautious policies. Consumers often react very strongly to failures (Smith et al., 1999). So when failures occur, companies need to response very adequately to restore customer satisfaction and to even reinforce loyalty and customer retention or improve those by excellent service recovery. In the current literature on service recovery and;service failures, research has been done in different industries, for example in the banking sector (Maxham & Netemeyer, 2002), the airline industry (Chang & Chang, 2010) and online shopping in general (Chang & Wang, 2012). These studies have led to different results, which tells us there are various conditions and circumstances of service recovery in different industries. In the video game industry, there are many ambiguities whether service recovery can be applied to the video game
industry, because video games are more products than services. However, delivering a proper sequel in a video game series and thereby fulfilling expectations of the customer can be seen as a service. Also, many researchers have investigated the psychosocial effects of video
7
gaming, when video gaming will lead to violent or on the other side to prosocial behaviour (Greitemeyer & Mügge, 2013; Granic et al., 2014). This study, however, will not include the psychosocial point of view, but this research will approach video gaming from a marketing and consumer behaviour perspective. The interest of this research lies within the video game industry and how customer values can be linked to failures of video games. Also, there will be checked whether the strength of the community and product improvement could influence the relationship between failures and the sales of a video game sequel.
Video games, just like other products in the creative industries, can be considered as experience goods, whereas video games can be evaluated and reviewed after experiencing the video game. However, before the release of a game or especially a game sequel, there can appear arousal at different online communities and generally on the Internet. Game review sites as Metacritic.com can be seen as online communities where users and experts can leave their comments about video games and other media as movies and music. Last decennia, video games have gained popularity what may imply that the influence of those review sites has increased. Consumers play games, online and offline, to get different consumption experiences in the form of hedonic values and utilitarian values (Davis et al., 2013).
Therefore, on the one hand, video gaming can be considered as a hedonic activity or hedonic consumption, when it approaches emotions and feelings during the experience. On the contrary, video gaming can be seen as a utilitarian activity, when it fulfils functional and beneficial wishes and when the video game has got “value for the money” (Overby & Lee, 2006). Many authors (Li et al.; Bridges & Florsheim; cited in Davis et al., 2013) support the view that the hedonic or pleasure-oriented experience of a video game is more involved in experiencing video games than the utilitarian experience, where it is about the productivity-oriented consumption. However, Ng and Roy (2012) state that the experience of the game
8
depends on the type of consumer. Although much academic research has been done on video gaming, our knowledge of customer valuation of video games is limited.
It seems video games are not always being received well and consumers are not
always satisfied experiencing a video game. Even though companies try to prepare themselves in the best possible way to fulfil the wishes of the sharply rising demand of customers, they cannot always accomplish to meet the demands of the customer. Reasons for this trend are the divergent interests of the consumer and the intense criticism of consumers altogether, but also the different types of customers and their preferences. These times, customers are expecting even more of companies due to all recent technical improvements, the development of video games and the enormous offer of different products. Partly because of this, it seems that growing consumer power in this age of digital developments has become a leading trend in the area of marketing (Labrecque et al., 2013). Thereby comes the influence of the Internet in the last decennia and this has been reignited by the rise of the social media. These
developments make it more easily for consumers to retrieve information and to be critical at products and services through easily accessible and transparent platforms.
As assumed by Davis et al. (2013), consumers consume games to experience utilitarian and hedonic value. Thus, when a video game does not meet the demands of the consumer, it can be assumed that consumers will face two different types of failures:
utilitarian failures and hedonic failures. Utilitarian failures occur when a video game does not meet the expectation in the field of utilitarian values such as ease of use, complexity and control. Hedonic failures occur when video games fail to meet hedonic values such as deliver a positive mood and provide a high level of fun and satisfaction. Hedonic failures are more subjective and associated with affection, while utilitarian failures are more associated with cognition (Zajonc & Markus, 1982). This thesis will furthermore investigate what impact both types of these failures have on sales or performance of video games.
9
As an answer to those failures, companies can provide so-called service recovery. When service failures happen, companies need to react adequately to satisfy customers, to prevent losing customers and to restore the satisfaction of the customers. Video game companies can achieve this by releasing a sequel which meets the increased demands of the customers or even improve the sequel in an innovative way. In this study we measure service recovery by the product improvement. The product improvement will be the difference between the average review score of the previous edition of the game sequel and the average review score of the current edition given by experts.
At last, this study will investigate the community strength or the impact of
communities based around certain video games on the sales of video game sequels. When games or other products and brands, in general, are satisfactory, communities are likely increase in popularity, and when games are unsatisfactory, communities are likely to decrease in popularity. However, the consumers’ identification with the company might moderate the impact of negative publicity or service failures (Einwiller et al., 2006). If a consumer
identifies himself with a brand or product, he might care more when negative news has been published or he might even care less when the identification is too strong. Negative reviews in games could therefore even generate sales under certain conditions, or it can increase
purchase likelihood and sales by enhancing product awareness, which indirectly strengths the likelihood of the community (Berger et al., 2010).
The interest of this thesis lies in proving the effects of the different types of failures on video game performance and what role product improvement and the community strength can play to moderate this impact. To conduct this research, the following question has been posed:
How do utilitarian and hedonic failures in online consumer reviews influence the sales of video game sequels?
10
During the following sections, the different theories on this subject will be discussed, followed up by the hypotheses and the conceptual framework. Then the methodology and the data collection will be described. After this section, the findings will be presented in the results section. At last, the results will be discussed, and there will be suggestions for further research.
2. Literature Review
1. The video game market
The video game industry has been very successful since its beginning growth in the late 1970s. Despite the resistance of the government and concerned parents in the 1990s, the video game market survived easily and had transformed into a multi-billion dollar juggernaut, which has even surpassed the movie and music industry (Sacranie, 2010; Zhuang et al., 2013).
The market has become increasingly competitive too, with video game companies publishing an enormous amount of titles per year and promoting their products in every niche and taste imaginable. Consumers in the United States only have spent more than 20 billion dollars on video games and equipment in 2012 (Entertainment Software Association, 2013) and this increased to 21.5 billion dollars in 2013. Given the most recent developments, these rising trends will continue in the next couple of years or even decennia (Entertainment Software Association, 2014). So the industry is still growing, and this is emphasized by Michael D. Gallagher, CEO of The Entertainment Software Association (2013). The given mission of this company is to “serve the business and public affairs needs of companies that publish computer and video games for video game consoles” and it realises this on global stage. In one of their the most recent published report, they write: “The computer and video
11
game industry have experienced an explosive growth which has not been found in any other sector” (Entertainment Software Association, 2014).
Meulen & Rivera (2013) predict in their article on Gartner Inc. (Gartner.com) that the world’s total video game market will rise from 78 billion dollars in 2012 to 111 billion dollars in 2015. Gartner Inc. is the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company. This information again underscores the continuous rapid growth of the market. Because these trends are evolving every year, mainly due to the revelation of new consoles and because the market is still developing, there has not been done much research about the current video game performance. On one side, this is quite remarkable because a gigantic collection of big data is available. However, on the other side this is logical because the data are still very young and raw and needs to be analysed thoroughly (Chen et al.,2012).
Also, representative studies in the US, which is considered the biggest market for sales of video games, indicated that almost every American teen plays video games (about 97%) with the average amount 13 hours per week playing time. Other surveys have shown that more than half of the adults play video games (Greitemeyer & Mügge, 2014). These
population numbers again confirm the presence and popularity of video games in the culture of people in all stages of life. Cadin and Guérin (2006, p. 251) use the term cultural
capitalism in their research, which investigates the significant impact of the video game market on the society. They do not only mention the economic weight of the video games sector, on what they initially based their research upon, but they believe video games play a greater part, and that video games are part of human’s culture.
Although the last couple of years economy has been very prosperous for companies selling video games, many of them have had a hard time surviving in this highly competitive industry. Failing in this industry can be catastrophic for businesses, and that is why companies need to overthink their strategies continuously. To keep up with the rising developments of
12
these days, companies have to come up with new market strategies and have to figure out what could be successful for the long term. Therefore, it is also important to keep up with the latest trends and to come up with innovative ideas. For video games, sales figures are to be considered as one of the most important performance measures which companies take into account. This is confirmed by Sacranie (2010) and he added to it that the demand side is the most influential side in the market, where the customers and the potential customers are in charge of this market. The supply side, on the other hand, is considered to have less influence, because when the supply runs out, it is not very difficult to create new copies and put them in the stores. As a consequence of this fact, Sacranie (2010) says the market has been considered as perfectly elastic and thus the focus lies on the demand of video games.
2. Word-of-mouth marketing and the impact of consumer reviews
Marketing in its broadest sense has been a prominent domain in the sales of video games. As marketing has been developing since it has originated, the marketing for video games needs to adapt all the time. The domains and theories of marketing keep on changing, and the research on marketing is still extending (Achrol & Kotler, 2011). Theories have evolved from an exchange paradigm to a network paradigm or even to a crowd-based
paradigm. Consumer power does not only rely on the individual wishes of the consumers, but it relies on the demand of the crowd as a whole. These pools of consumers have been
transformed into product-based or brand-based communities and with the aid of the current advances in mobile technology and data infrastructure it transforms into virtual communities. The main change in this process is the focus on marketing networks instead of dyadic
exchanges. This process involves companies focussing more on grouped public opinions exchanged from (social) networks. An example in the world of video gaming is the excessive use of game review sites and communities, which has gained much interest of game reviewers
13
and video game publishers since the origin of the Internet. Other main changes in this process of evolving marketing are firstly the development from an individual satisfaction perspective to fulfil all the consumer experiences. The goal to only satisfy consumers has expired in this world of marketing; nowadays it is all about satisfying consumers and moreover to keep them satisfied after delivering the product or service. Another significant trend is the growing consumer power in this digital age of technological developments (Labrecque et al., 2013). One of the leading causes of this is the emergence of the social media and the empowerment of the Internet. It has become a “social media landscape of ubiquitous connectivity, enabled through mobile devices” (p. 257). These developments enable people to access information wherever and whenever and this also leads to gather huge amounts of consumer data. This trend specifically is very useful and interesting for business and how to link marketing investments to business performance. The increase of consumer power and the adapted focus of companies that are making changes to serve consumers better have got a large impact on the quality and quantity of consumer and marketing research. To implement new marketing concepts in organisations, managers should understand their customers, and they have to stay close to them to provide products and services. Often this means they have to change their business dramatically, but sometimes the business is highly merged with consumer interests and technology, e.g. the video game market so that they have already implemented the right market orientation (Peter & Olson, 2001).
Because consumer demand is highly uncertain in creative industries in general,
producers also tend to use ideas and concepts that have been successful in the past (Situmeang et al., 2013). This theory applied to the video game market led to the popular strategy of releasing new video game products as sequels and this successful strategy has been proved by video games series, for example, Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, Pokémo, and Halo (Levy & Smith, 2014). Situmeang et al. (2014) have examined the relationship between
14
evaluation of past editions in a series of video games and the success of sequels. They came to the conclusion that past evaluations of previous editions are in any way related to sequel success. This reasoning has explained that the original product from the series might have developed a positive image, and this has been carried over to the sequel, making this sequel more attractive and above all, it creates awareness.
As mentioned before, consumer power has hugely increased what has led to an explosion of online consumer and expert reviews. This has become a valuable resource for video game consumers and customers. With the still growing popularity of the Internet and all its related social media platforms and virtual communities, the possibilities to seek
information seem to be limitless. Zhu and Zhang (2010) examined whether online word-of-mouth (WOM) could have an impact on the sales of video games. When consumers intend to purchase new products, they often consult the Internet to seek quality information. A survey in 2014 on the website of Business (business.com) showed that more than half of the
population of Internet users search for online reviews before purchasing products or services. This number is still growing, and the public that visits these sites is becoming more critical than ever. This has even become more accessible because the tools for leaving an opinion are very easily approachable, transparent and user-friendly. Word-of-mouth has attracted even more attention among practitioners as it could be situated as a new alternative marketing communication tool between the traditional communication tools (Trusov et al., 2009). Word-of-mouth is currently participating as one of the most prominent features on the Internet. There are numerous possibilities for consumers to share their preferences, views or experiences with others. However, it is also an opportunity for firms to benefit from the marketing possibilities of word-of-mouth, in the form of reacting and anticipating on consumer behaviour.
15
Thus, the number of online review systems is growing and many people assume that online consumer reviews are real measurements for the average WOM and have significant impacts on consumer decisions, although the influence consumer reviews may vary across different products or services in the same category. Zhu and Zhang (2010) assert that online marketing strategies of firms may not be useful for all types of services or products. This implication will mean that companies have to adapt their online word-of-mouth marketing or eWOM (electronic word-of-mouth) marketing strategy to respond to consumer reviews. Another result of their study is that online consumer reviews have a greater impact on the sales of popular products because popular products tend to have more reviews, and this makes these reviews more trustworthy. A second reason is, given a large number of online reviews for popular products, that the consumers are more confident that they can find good reviews for the designated product. Contrariwise, these online consumer reviews for popular products can be less influential when consumers have a lower need to find online consumer reviews. Because the popularity has already indicated signals of higher quality, consumers do not need more information to make their decision.
However, Zhu and Zhang (2010) found two restrictions in their research on the efficacy of online reviews. First, online consumer reviews may represent preferences of consumers, and they may predict product sales, but they might have limited influence on consumers’ decisions. These reviews can serve more as predictors than as influencers of product sales. Second, those online reviewers are not a randomly drawn sample. Extremely satisfied and extremely dissatisfied customers are more likely to participate in word-of-mouth marketing than average users, and that is why reviews may not represent a full overview of the objective opinion of the whole population.
16
3. Community strength and the impact of negative reviews
Video game producers and communities of video game players are strongly related (Burger-Helmchen & Cohendet, 2011). This interaction has even become more intense since the introduction and development of social platforms. However, these developments have led to new managerial challenges, as the extent of the market has become more and more complex.
With the presence of online communities and the newest tools for sharing information, Clements and Ohashi (as cited in Sacranie, 2010) suggest there are network effects in the market for video games. The idea behind this is when a platform, e.g. Xbox or Playstation, has got more community members, those community members will buy more platform-related products instead of other available alternatives. To support this theory, when the number of hardware platforms sold gets larger, video game publishers would like to release more titles, because they know they will sell more if more potential customers can buy their titles.This theory has been named the bandwagon effect (Gavious & Mizrahi, as cited in Sacranie, 2010), as when the popularity of a platform increases, it will attract more people who will support the platform. This bandwagon effect could also be applied to video game, as the users can get hooked to particular video game series or particular video game publishers.
Negative publicity of video games in communities often creates much arousal among the members of the community. Also, negative publicity often causes more harm than good, and this makes sense when you approach this theory rationally (Berger et al., 2010). This is assumed as a fact by many, although a well-known pronunciation in marketing theories is “any publicity is good publicity” (p. 815). This statement, however, is not supported by many studies on this subject, so it seems this statement can be questioned.
Still, there are studies in which they give examples whether negative publicity can lead to increasing sales. To support this theory, we have to look at the consumer behaviour part. Berger et al. (2010) state there are different routes through which publicity influences
17
consumer behaviour. Firstly, publicity in general influences product success through affecting product evaluations and this is called the persuasive impact of publicity (p. 816). For example, if an expert critic negatively reviews a video game, this can generate negative attitudes by customers and decrease the likelihood of buying the video game, assuming customers are reading reviews written by experts. However, mostly negative information should decrease product evaluations, the change of attitude alone cannot explain why negative publicity would increase sales or the preference for a product. So there should be an another factor which negative publicity would increase sales.
Secondly, in the article of Nord and Peter (1980), it emerges that any publicity can cause positive effects when it creates product awareness or accessibility. It is known that consumers have finite attention, and the overload of cultural offerings these times means most consumers are not aware of every new product or brand release. Consideration plays a large part
explaining the phenomenon ‘choice.’ Consumers are less likely to be affected when the brand or product is not on top of mind (Nedungadi, 1990). Berger et al. (2010) emphasize there could be a different effect of negative publicity if there is prior awareness of a product. The awareness clearly strengthens when the consumer is a fan of the product or brand, as they are already loyal and committed to the product or brand. Also, the source of the negative publicity could have different effects on the results. A negative review from a well-known author in for example the New York Times could have been adopted more seriously than a negative review from a random person in an unknown magazine.
Another factor which could moderate the impact of negative news on the consumption of a product is the community strength (Situmeang et al., 2014). When brand communities are linked with customer loyalty (p. 1472), larger communities can relate to higher consumer loyalty. Discussing the product within those communities can also increase the enjoyment of a product. Community members can help each other with new information or can even offer
18
practical assistance. In the case of video game communities, members can support each other with for example the so-called walkthroughs of games. These walkthroughs show how to continue with a game or they can just discuss interesting points they met when playing the game. Even negative publicity or failures in this situation can be turned into something positive, when the community found solutions or workarounds or when they make fun out of a failure, so when they turn negativity into humour (Zhang, 1996). So customer loyalty can take in the impact of failures although it seems the effect of humour appears to more effective when the persons’ need for cognition is low rather than high. This will imply that consumers who are looking for utilitarian values and who are looking for ‘value for money’ when purchasing a product or service, will take negativity even harder.
4. Service failures
In the previous section, negative publicity for video games can be seen as failures or service failures. Service failures are often inevitable in service industries (Hart et al. 1990).
Therefore, mistakes are a critical part of the policy and process of every service. Accidents quickly happen, and small mistakes can have large consequences. Therefore companies should be cautious all the time and take careful precautions to prevent failures from happening.
In these times, people are critical about everything. As the number of product or service reviews increase, so will the critical reviews on games and the emphasis on failures. This focus can be explained by the fact that sensational or negative news are more likely to trigger emotions of the viewers and are more likely to elicit emotional responses than non-sensational news (Uribe & Gunter, 2007). News stories, which are traditionally classified as ‘sensational’, often contain a dramatic factor or are placed in a dramatic context, like crime stories or disasters and accidents. However the research of Uribe and Gunter (2007) is about
19
British TV news, they generalise their theory by saying that other media which contains the ‘sensational news aspect’ will also gain more attention than common news. Translating sensational news in online reviews of video gaming, we could say failures of video games can be called sensational. The expectation of video games is often very high, partly explained by the enormous competition amongst video games and the easy switch to competitors, failures can be remarked as sensational news for companies. This theory has been reinforced by the emergence of the new media and the numerous offering of media channels (Knobloch-Westerwick et al., 2005). The today’s society operates in a new world of infinite media impulses which have been supported by the continuous technological developments. Due to this wealth of powerful stimuli, the phenomenon of choice and selecting media have become more important. Also, the concept of selective exposure emerges in considering the
relationship between the media and its public.
As video games can be considered as art, they can be reviewed as art too (Jenkins, 2005). If a video game disappoints the average user of the game, the video game publisher fails as an artist. The failure of a product out of the creative industries can be attributed to different causes. Consumers base their reviews on game aesthetics, and this can be divided into three phases (Park, 1993). The first part is the individual experience of the quality of an object, because when customers pay for a product or service, they have a certain expectation of the product. Second, the wishes of an individual to explore the potential of the experience entirely, so customers will expect even more when consuming the product or service. At last, the selection of the individual to what point elements contribute to their experience. These definitions of aesthetic experience could be very useful for evaluating video game
performances and thereby, evaluating consumer reviews. Although the pressure on companies to deliver proper products is very high and the high-quality standards are increasing by time, some video game products are not satisfactory when they are released. This dissatisfaction
20
results in a rain of reactions on different game review sites and forums on game based communities.
Altogether, companies that are concerned with producing video games would not be able to survive without customers buying their products (Hart et al., 2000). Even though the video game market is very prosperous, many companies have got a hard time to survive the last few years, partly because of the high entrance costs and the fierce competition. Since the technical landscape changes continuously and costs for developing new games have increased outstandingly, companies found it tough to keep up. So, surviving in this market is tough, and the pressure to perform is extremely high. That is why commercial failures could be
catastrophic for most companies. Also due to the continuous mutations of the video game market, they have to rethink the way they produce and promote games. As the core focus of most companies is to create the largest customer value by selling their products and services and creating as much profit as is possible, companies are concentrating on pre-sales marketing and are forgetting to pay attention to the after-sales marketing too. The fact is, errors are often inevitable so that pre-sales services will not have much impact anymore. However, companies should focus on after-sales service or service recovery what will be merged to product
improvement of the sequel for video games (Hart et al., 2000).
There are two main dimensions in theories on service failures (Wang, 2011). The first dimension is failure severity. This has been defined as the customer’s perceived intensity of service failure severity. This will mean the more intense the service failure, the greater the perceived loss of the customer. Despite good service recovery outcome and process, the customer will perceive less satisfaction when sufficient service recovery has taken place. Failure severity in the video game market could be characterised by game ratings in different game reviewing websites or by major known failures mentioned in reviews. When a game
21
scores very low compared to other games in the game series, it could also be seen as a high degree of failure severity.
Another dimension in the research field of service recovery is the justice theory. Previous research suggests that customer satisfaction and future behavioural intention as in repurchase intention are affected by perceived justice of customers in service recovery (Wang, 2011). Service recovery justice refers to the assessment of the customer considering the fairness on the way in which the process of service recovery after a service failure has been handled. This process can be approached from three different perspectives: interactional justice, procedural justice, and distributive justice (p. 352). Interactional justice refers to the way in which service failures are being handled by service providers along with the
interaction between the customers and the service providers. This can be interpersonal sensitivity, proper treatment of people and provide valid explanations for service failures. Procedural justice refers to the procedures used to get to the outcome of an exchange. This may include the perceived fairness of the procedures and different criteria for the recovery outcomes. Finally, distributive justice concerns the fairness of resources distribution and the transaction outcomes. More specifically, it is what customers may receive as an outcome of the service recovery. In the video game market, the justice theory could refer to the way how video game producers will react to customers when they deliver a game that has not been received well in their customer base.
5. Linking service failures to customer values
In the literature, many studies have been done on the usage and shopping value of customers (Murray & Bellman, 2011; Lin et al, 2012; Hirschman & Holbrook, 1982; Davis et al., 2012). However the consumer values of video games gain interest among researchers, there still is a lack of research in this area.
22
A video game can be seen as a cultural product; it is a comprehensive mix of art, technology and interactive storytelling (Burger-Helmchen & Cohendet, 2011). Thus, video game developers must take into account the expression of artistic values, make space for creative innovation and have to adapt the latest technological virtuosity to compete in the market of mass entertainment. Therefore, an analysis of different values helps video game publishers to differentiate video games and to release their product properly.
Consumers can play video games in different situations and on different consoles; they play games on the Internet, on mobile devices or on consoles to experience different values. Altogether, customer experiences of video games can be divided in a global two-way split: hedonic values, where the focus lies on the artistic and aesthetic part of video gaming and utilitarian values, where the focus lies on the technical part and the actual performance of the game related to the expectations. The next section will explain the link between the customer values and the experience of video games.
Hedonic consumption can be defined as those subjects of consumer behaviour that relate to multisensory, emotive and fantasy aspects of product usage experience (Hirschman & Holbrook, 1982). The term multisensory stands for the receipt of experiences which
includes multiple sensory modalities such as sounds, tastes, visual images, tactile impressions, and scents. These sensory experiences are often assumed to be afferent. Afferent nerves carry impulses from the body to the brain, and that is why hedonic consumption can be experienced physically and mentally. Hedonic experiences also posit efferent experiencing. This means that individuals do not only respond to multisensory impressions from external stimuli e.g. the taste of food or the smell of perfume, but they also react by generating images within
themselves. Those sensations are based on real events for construction. It is unlikely that consumers could generate detailed, multisensory images without having access to these
23
relevant real experiences. Thus, this multisensory imagery should be seen as a collection of historical recollections and fantasies. Besides, hedonic consumption also involves emotional arousal. Emotions are motivational phenomena and represent feelings such as fear, jealousy, joy or rage. This emotional arousal could be reflected in the mind and body because it can create both a psychological response as a physiological response. When judging video games on hedonic values, we consider different theories related to the sensational experience of a video game. This experience is mainly associated with enjoyment, pleasure, and their self-concept. From an exorbitant view, hedonic experiences are more subjective and associated with higher levels of enjoyment, which lead to higher levels of satisfaction and positive mood. Also, a hedonic encounter can involve heightened arousal, more interaction, more
involvement and perceived freedom (Davis et al., 2014).
To further analyse consumer values, we pick the term consumer behaviour in general. Consumer behaviour can be described as the dynamic interaction of cognition and affect, behaviour and the external circumstances by which people conduct the exchange aspects of their lives (Peter & Olson, 2001, p. 5). In this sentence, hedonic consumption seems to be more affective by nature as affective factors contain emotions, feeling states, moods, and attitudes. A clear example of which affection plays a major role in the development of preference is found in the choice of food (p. 123). Clearly, all cultures have their favourite food, which often is their cultural mark. Members of this kind of cultures, who dislike this assigned food product, are often seriously questioned. An example is the use of chili pepper as an ingredient in Mexico, which is inevitably present in most of the dishes. People of Mexico start eating chili at a very young age and are even forced to eat it because it is almost
inevitable. This is how they become affected with the product, and when a meal lacks chili, they will miss it and complain about it. This example shows how preferences often are acquired and how they are modified by affection.
24
As opposed to hedonic values, utilitarian values can play a part in evaluating products and services. Overby and Lee (2006) define utilitarian values as the overall assessment or judgement of functional benefits and sacrifices. Utilitarian values are particularly relevant for task-specific use; they include more cognitive aspects of attitude such as the economic value and the ‘value for the money’. Regarding consumer behaviour, utilitarian values can be more considered as cognition. When affection refers to the feelings of customers, cognition refers to the thinking of consumers and their beliefs about particular products or services (Peter & Olson, 2001). Cognition also refers to the mental processes and structures, and it is about understanding and interpretation of factors as stimuli and events. Altogether, it includes the beliefs, meanings, and knowledge of consumers that they have developed from their
experiences. Cohen (as cited in Zajonc & Markus, 1982) describes the cognitive decision model as a function of weighted attribute utilities. So choices are being made by comparing different product or service aspects and analyse those in a cognitive way.
Venkatesh et al. (2000) describe the operationalization of utilitarian consumption for video games as perceived ease of use, perceived control and perceived complexity. The ease of use affects utilitarian consumption because games, in general, contain goal-oriented outcomes and specific rules that can only be achieved if the consumer can control it. The perceived complexity is related to utilitarian values because it is important for consumers to keep up with the structure and direction of the game and to overcome gameplay barriers. At last, perceived control does matter as it reflects the skills of the consumer to control the experience. When consumers perceive that they manage to control a game, they will also perceive it easier to use and therefore less complicated.
Ng and Roy (2012) divide consumers into two groups when it comes to the regulatory goals of consumers on their relative focus on hedonic and utilitarian benefits of products and services. They argue promotion-focused consumers will have a more favourable attitude
25
towards products that have more hedonic benefits than utilitarian benefits. On the other hand, prevention-focused consumers tend to create a more favourable attitude towards a product or service when its utilitarian benefits are prominent in comparison to the hedonic benefits. In the case of generating preferences, it seems affective factors play an important part in creating preferences. So there could be assumed that it is more likely affection plays the most
important role in experiencing video games (Zajonc & Markus, 1982). However, in the case of video game sequels, companies have to deal with a customer base who are expecting a solid product and who are expecting value for their money. In this case, there could be assumed utilitarian and cognitive factors play a major role too in generating preferences. Using the theory of Ng and Roy (2012), you could say hedonic benefits may have a larger effect on consumers who are driven by affection, while utilitarian benefits may appeal to consumers who are more cognitive driven.
What applies to customer values could also be applied to failures, as failures are part of experiencing video games. There are two kinds of failures when customer values are linked to failures: hedonic failures and utilitarian failures. Both could have an impact on the
customer satisfaction and consequently on the sales of the sequel. Therefore, the following hypotheses have been purposed:
H1: Hedonic failures will have a negative impact on the sales of the sequel H2: Utilitarian failures will have a negative impact on the sales of the sequel
26
We discussed the effect of community strength, which can play a moderating role on the relationship between failures and the performance of a sequel, and therefore the following hypotheses are being purposed:
H3: Community strength will positively affect the relationship between hedonic failures and the sales of the video game
H4: Community strength will positively affect the relationship between utilitarian failures and the sales of the video game
6. Service recovery
Companies have to fit in this new shift of marketing and have to adapt their services as much as they can in favour of the customers. However, services companies often do not provide their services perfectly and flawlessly. Mistakes and failures are part of every service, and even the best service companies cannot prevent employees from making mistakes and to avoid contingency system breakdowns. Thereby comes the fact that consumer behaviour cannot almost be predicted exactly. Nevertheless, errors are inevitable, but dissatisfied customers could be evitable in most situations. Companies cannot always avoid failures, but they can learn how to recover from those (Hart et al., 1990). A well-served recovery can turn frustrated customers into loyal customers and can even create more goodwill than when no mistakes have been made
Customers want to receive at least the same value as they expected in return when they have paid for a certain service or product. Companies cannot always live up to the
expectations. This results in customers complaining about anything. Also, the influence complaints are gaining power due to the transparency of the media nowadays. Companies are not in the position anymore to eliminate those complaints, but they can try to respond
27
effectively to them. Therefore, managers should focus on service recovery. The process of recovery for services in literature has been called service recovery (Maxham & Netemeyer, 2002). This process describes how the firm attempts to recover or rectify a product- or
service-related failure. Service recovery can either dismiss the negative effects of failures or it can reinforce customer relationships. The service recovery process includes any action
necessary to satisfy or return a customer who has experienced service failure to a state of satisfaction (Buttle & Burton, 2002).
Different studies have emphasized the importance of service recovery. Under some circumstances, just a decrease of a few customer failures can increase profits enormously (Betts et al., 2011). Because this impact is quite significant, researchers have become aware of the necessity to learn more about the service recovery process and the effects of service quality. Despite recent progress in studies on service recovery, there is still a lot to learn about the influence of service recovery on customer perceptions of satisfaction, justice and intent (Maxham & Netemeyer, 2002).
Theories on service recovery support two dimensions of recovery: process and outcome (Weun et al., 2004, p. 134). The process dimension refers to the handling of the service provider during service recovery, for example how the service has been delivered. The outcome of service recovery, on the other hand, is defined as the final result and is tangible. To explain the success of video games sequels, it has been argued that experiences of earlier editions of the game will be transferred to the next edition (Situmeang et al., 2013). This is how new editions can profit from the success of previous editions. On the other side, they can also suffer from the comparison with earlier editions, when the experiences of the previous edition generate high expectations that could lead to a lower level of satisfaction of the sequel. The failing performance of the sequel could perhaps be declared by the different types of failures that can happen during gameplay or by experiencing it.
28
Besides of the kind of failures a video game sequel can contain, other factors may play a part in the evaluation of a video game. As Situmeang et al. (2013) have researched the factors that lead to changes in the reviews of sequels, there are other factors which can have an influence on the outcome. For example, when negative publicity or negative reviews increase sales or when online communities can play a large role in determining the success of a sequel.
As mentioned before, relationship marketing is an emerging paradigm in the literature on marketing, with trust and commitment as key factors (Wean et al., 2004). The
developments of the Internet economies have enhanced the importance of customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is the “deeply held commitment to re-patronize or rebuy a preferred service or product consistently in future, thereby causing repetitive same brand or brand-set
purchasing, despite situational marketing efforts and situational influences having the
possibility to cause switching behavior” (Wang et al., 2001, p. 351). In contexts of electronic commerce, such as the video game market, customer loyalty is often conceptualized as conative loyalty or behavior intention. Thus, the favorable attitude towards a video game brand could result in repetitive buying behavior. Satisfied and loyal customers will drive the business. Advertising can bring customers in once, but the challenge is to keep them returning to the business and to provide them with excellent service, which includes solving customer problems and recover service failures (Tschohl, 2012).
Customer loyalty to service providers is not only dependent upon their level of dissatisfaction or satisfaction. Buttle and Burton (2001) suggest that customer loyalty is an attitudinal state, reflecting trust, value, and commitment within customer-supplier
relationships. Service recovery can even cause a better relationship between the customer and the company. This happens when the customer is even more satisfied when service recovery has happened. This phenomenon has been mentioned in the literature as the ‘service recovery
29
paradox,’ and it refers to the reaction of the customer after a service failure when post-failure satisfaction exceeds pre-failure satisfaction (Magnini et al., 2007). This theory comprises that effective service recovery will not only satisfy the customer but will take it to a higher level of satisfaction and loyalty.
Service recovery can be translated into product improvement of a sequel when
applying the theory to the video game market. The process dimension of service recovery can be seen as the marketing and pre-release activities of a sequel in a game series and the
outcome dimension can be regarded as the tangible end product, judged by the consumers (Weun et al., 2004). This will be tested according to the following hypotheses:
H5: Product improvement will positively affect the relationship between hedonic failures and the sales of the game
H6: Product improvement will positively affect the relationship between utilitarian failures and the sales of the game
30
3. Conceptual framework
Model 1 and 2 H3 H1 H2 H4H1: Hedonic failures will have a negative impact on the sales of the sequel H2: Utilitarian failures will have a negative impact on the sales of the sequel
H3: Community strength will positively affect the relationship between hedonic failures and the sales of the game
H4: Community strength will positively affect the relationship between utilitarian failures and the sales of the game
Hedonic failures Utilitarian failures
Sales of the sequel Community strength
31
Model 3
H5
H6
H5: Product improvement will positively affect the relationship between hedonic failures and the sales of the game
H6: Product improvement will positively affect the relationship between utilitarian failures and the sales of the game
4. Methodology
Introduction
Current literature on video games has described different aspects of video games, like sales determinants (Sacranie, 2010) and there are other studies where the focus lies on how
different characteristics of video games can be analysed. This research, however, is interested in the difference between hedonic values and utilitarian values and their impact on the sales of video games. By examining the literature on hedonic values and utilitarian values, there seems to be a distinction between the reviewing of video games. Video games can excel in a hedonic or utilitarian way, but they can also fail to meet the expectations. If video games fail in the area of hedonic values, and when hedonic terms are used to describe the failures, we use the
Hedonic failures Utilitarian failures
Sales of the sequel Product improvement
32
term hedonic failures and when it fails to meet utilitarian values, we use the term utilitarian failures.
To learn the different aspects of the type of failures, a database research has been conducted. This database includes a collection of video game reviews and other data of video games and video games sequels from Metacritic.com. To filter out the failures out of a review, many reviews have been read, and a filter of adjectives (Appendices 1 &2) has been applied to indicate the different type of failures. There has been chosen for a database, consisting of the data of video game sequels where the standalone released games have been disregarded, because in this research setting no conclusions can be drawn from those video games of which no previous edition is known.
In the next section there will be a description of the sample, followed up by the definition of the variables and finally, the data analysis will be described.
Description of sample
To analyse the relationship between the effect of different kinds of service failures on customer sales and the effect of service recovery and community strength in a moderating role, we will conduct a database research and thereby a regression analysis.
The data, necessary to carry out the research, have been retrieved from the website Metacritic.com. Metacritic.com can be seen as an online review gathering platform, where visitors can leave their comments about movies, TV, music or video games. The origin of Metacritic.com started with the idea of capturing a single score to summarize an
entertainment product. Nowadays, this single score has been called the Metascore. This Metascore has been important for this research because it is a weighted average of the most respected critic reviews posted and this has been carefully selected by experienced
33
reliability of the selection of the Metascore critics because common visitors will not know who selected the critics and if they are prejudiced. But Metacritic.com is assumed to be a commonly used review site for video games, as it has been used in other studies (Chen et al.; Hennig-Thurau et al.; Zhu & Zhang; as cited in Situmeang et al., 2014).
To retrieve the data from the website, customized software has been used which gathered the data through some smart logarithms from Metacritic.com. The sales that belong to the video games have been collected from the website VGChartz.com. VGChartz.com is a publishing website which publishes estimates relating to worldwide game hardware and software sales of the ever-expanding game database.
In this study, the dataset consists of the reviews of 1107 games. The actual database was even consisting more video games titles, but a filter has been applied to only select video game series, which consist of at least one sequel and thus, we have filtered out the single released games or the stand alone releases.
Furthermore, we have picked the games of three different platforms, categorized in xbox, consisting of games from the Xbox and Xbox 360; playstation, composed of games from PlayStation 2 and 3 and at last nintendo, which contains games of the Nintendo
platforms GameCube and Wii. The games used in the dataset are from all genres possible on these platforms (Appendix 3) and other relevant attribute data have been collected, like the publisher, publish year and age restriction. The total overview of the different game
34
Variables
Hedonic and utilitarian failures
To decide whether a review contains either utilitarian failures or hedonic failures, the theory has been applied that expert reviews, in this case, the critic reviews, will provide an extensive description of all aspects of the game and will go more in depth. This theory has partly been derived from the signalling theory (Spence, as cited in Situmeang et al., 2014, p. 1469). This theory explains how decisions have been formed if information is limited available by focussing on different signals of quality chosen by the decision maker.
User reviews, on the other hand, will contain all sorts of reviews and are more assessed as every possible emotion the large public wants to express (Kim & Gupta, 2012). To extract reliable data for both the utilitarian failures as the hedonic failures, the choice has been made only to use critic reviews for the utilitarian failures and user reviews for the hedonic failures. The variables of the hedonic failures and the utilitarian failures consist of the count of the specific words (Appendices 1 and 2) mentioned in the reviews and are being summed per game. The words that have been used are compiled by using signalling words that indicate negative hedonic and utilitarian values. There has been chosen to use forty words to indicate the failures and the selection of these words are a composition of frequently used negative adjectives (Sassoon, 2010) and by reading an extensive random sample of game reviews on Metacritic.com. Some of the words e.g. ‘poor’ (Appendices 1 and 2) can be used to both indicate hedonic or utilitarian failures, in combination with specific nouns, and that is why those are mentioned in both tables. Also, some words have not been mentioned
completely e.g. ‘simpl’ (Appendix 2), because in reviews both the extractions ‘simple’ and ‘simplistic’ can be used.
To validate whether these words summed up can be marked as failures, the standard of the reviewing score below 6 has been used, measured by the score given on Metacritic.com.
35
This standard has been derived from the Net Promoter Score (NPS) (Reichheld & Covey, 2006). The NPS is a management tool that can be used to estimate the customer satisfaction by gauging the loyalty of the customer relationships of the firm. The calculation of the NPS is based on responses to the question “How likely is it that you would recommend our
company/product/service to a friend or colleague?”. Anyone rating 9 or 10 is labelled a “promoter”, the people who are rating a 7 or 8 are being labelled as “passively satisfied” and who are rating 6 or below are labelled as “detractors”. In this research the reviewers giving a score below 6 are being seen as detractors and therefore the specified words (Appendices 1 and 2) in those reviews with a score below 6 have been indicated as hedonic or utilitarian failures.
Moderators community strength and product improvement
The variable Community Strength will act as a moderator on the relationship between hedonic or utilitarian failures and the sales of sequels. To measure the community strength of a game series, the average past sales have been used as an indicator. A community for video games can also be approached as all players of one game platform, but we have made the choice only to use the average past sales because this is more relevant for this research and this is most reliable and valid measurable. When measuring the community strength, all sales of the past editions of the video game series have been included in calculating the average.
Also, the product improvement will play a moderating role in the relationship between the hedonic or utilitarian failures and de sales of sequels. From the theories of service
recovery, most practical way to look at this for video games is to look at the Product Improvement. This have been composited to subtract the Metascore of the past edition from the Metascore of the current edition. The outcome can be negative, and then the service recovery can be judged as unsuccessful, or the outcome can be positive, when there is
36
perceived product improvement. This seems to be the most reliable way to measure the product improvement because experts have reviewed the reviews which have been used for the Metascore.
Sales of the video game
The only dependent variable that has been used in this research is the sales of the video game sequel. We have chosen to use this variable, because it is the most reliable and representing outcome of the actual consumption of the population. The data has been retrieved from VGChartz.com, one of the most prominent websites in publishing sales data of video games. The sales data that have been used in the results section are presented in million dollars.
Data analysis
The data have been collected and prepared in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access. Hereafter, the filtered data will be processed in IBM SPSS Statistics. This preparation includes the filtering and cleaning the data, and excluding or adjusting the missing and false values.
In this research, the dependent variable is the Sales of the concerning video game. The independent variables in this research are the Hedonic Failures, Utilitarian Failures and in a moderating role the Community Strength and the Product Improvement. First of all, the descriptive statistics, the mean and the standard deviation of the variables, will be presented in combination with the bivariate correlation between the variables. This is shown in Table 1. Secondly, the relationship between the utilitarian and hedonic failures and the sales of the game has been investigated. The first condition is to check whether there is a significant impact of the appearance of failures on the sales of the game. Thirdly, there will be controlled if the moderating variable Product Improvement has got a significant impact on the
37
relationship between the different types of failures and the sales. Also, a linear regression will be conducted. At last, the impact of the other moderating variable, Community Strength, will be checked and this also by performing a linear regression. The data will be presented in different models, whereby also will be checked which part of the outcome can be assigned to the selected model by showing the R Square. The models are shown in Tables 2, 3, 4 and 5.
5. Results
Descriptive statistics
As shown in Table 1, the descriptive statistics and the bivariate correlations are being presented. For this research, 1107 games are being selected consisting of sequels from different game series. The mean of the Sales is presented in million dollars, as is the Community Strength, which is the average sales of the past editions.
When looking at the means of the variables, we see a slight difference in the mean of the number of Utilitarian Failures and Hedonic Failures. Also, the mean of the Product Improvement is shown, which is a little negative.
Table 1
Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations.
Mean Std. dev. 1 2 3 4 1 Sales 3,359 5,500 2 Hedonic Failures ,135 ,493 -,060 3 Utilitarian Failures ,210 ,719 -,051 ,394* 4 Product Improvement -,13 1,362 ,061 -,135* ,163* 5 Community Strength 3,705 5,981 ,438** -,060 -,051 ,018
*. Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). **. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
38
Although, we see in Table 1 that the hedonic failures and utilitarian failures are negatively correlated with the sales, we cannot statistically prove there is a correlation, because the significance levels (2-tailed) are respectively p= 0,166 and p= 0,234. However, Table 1 shows us a significant positive correlation between the utilitarian failures and hedonic failures (r= ,394). This correlation may be declared by the appearance of both hedonic and utilitarian failures in reviews. Only the reviews with a Metascore lower than 6 have been counted, so the chance of mentioning a negative remark or failure has become higher. This may be a reason why the correlation is significant, but this has not been statistically proven. Table 1 also shows a significant negative correlation between the product improvement and the hedonic failures (r= -,135) and a significant positive relationship between the product improvement and the utilitarian failures. At last Table 1 indicates a strong significant (r= ,438 ,p < ,001) positive correlation between the community strength and the sales. This makes sense, as the community strength consists of the average past sales of previous editions. We assume the sales will not differ too much from the average past sales. As some of the correlations may be significant, they do not exceed the correlation level of r=,500. So we assume multicollinearity is not a major concern in this research.
Test of the hypotheses
Determinants of the sales of video games
A linear regression has been performed to test the impact of hedonic and utilitarian failures on the sales of the video game. The results of this regression are shown in Table 2. Model 1 will be used to test hypothesis 1 and 2. Model 1 predicts 59 percent of the determinants of the sales in this case (R Square= ,590). The results show that the hedonic failures have a negative
39
impact on the dependent variable Sales (B= -,038, p < 0,01). So hypothesis 1 is supported. The utilitarian failures seem to have a negative impact on the sales too (B= -,031, p < 0,05) and so this model also supports hypothesis 2.
These results suggest when utilitarian failures and hedonic failures are mentioned in the game reviews, they have a negative impact on the sales of the video game. Although the overall effect is not too large for hedonic failures (B= -,038, p < 0,01) and utilitarian failures (B= -,031, p < 0,05), the effect is significant.
The variance inflation factor (VIF) in this model can be used as an indicator of
multicollinearity. The VIF for Hedonic Failures (VIF= 9,573) and Utilitarian Failures (VIF= 8,449) may not be optimal (VIF higher than 1, lower than 5), it is still lower than 10 and this can be seen as an acceptable level of VIF (Hair et al., 1995). We can conclude from this that multicollinearity is not a major concern, but it can still be a factor to be reckoned with.
Table 2
Results section
Variable Model 1
Coefficient S.E. Sig. VIF
(Constant) 1,292 ,168 ,000** Hedonic Failures -,038 ,006 ,001** 9,573 Utilitarian Failures -,031 ,005 ,044* 8,449 Product Improvement ,169 ,104 ,106 1,002 Community Strength ,493 ,024 ,000** 1,019 R Square ,595 Adjusted R Square ,590
a. Dependent Variable: Sales
*. Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). **. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
Moderating effect of community strength
Model 2 has been used to test hypotheses 3 and 4, whether the community strength can have a moderating role on the relationship between hedonic and utilitarian failures on the one side,
40
and sales on the other side. Again, a linear regression has been used to perform this test. This model predicts 63,5 percent of the sales (R Square= ,635).
The moderating effect of community strength on hedonic failures is positive (B= ,041) for the outcome Sales, but the effect is insignificant (p= ,099), so hypothesis 3 is not
supported. The effect of community strength combined with utilitarian failures on sales is significant though (B= -,026, p < 0,05). As the coefficient of this combined variable, Community Strength*Utilitarian Failures is less negative than the coefficient of Utilitarian Failures (B= -,052), we state that hypothesis 4 is supported.
These results indicate that if the size of the user community or community strength is strong, it will not affect the relationship between the presence of hedonic failures and the sales of the video game, which contains negative. At the other hand, community strength will have a positive effect on the relationship between the presence of utilitarian failures and the sales. It seems community strength will be superior to utilitarian failures, but not to hedonic failures. This result could also indicate that hedonic failures have a stronger impact on consumer behaviour than utilitarian failures, as the effect of hedonic failures is not affected.
Table 3
Results section
Variable Model 2
Coefficient S.E. Sig. VIF
(Constant) 1,277 ,163 ,000**
Hedonic Failures -,066 ,039 ,089 7,381
Utilitarian Failures -,052 ,032 ,103 9,258
Product Improvement ,101 ,101 ,318 1,043
Community Strength ,492 ,024 ,000** 1,171
Prod. Impr.*Comm. Stre. -,190 ,033 ,125 1,205
Comm. Stre.*Hedo. Fail. ,041 ,007 ,099 6,082
Comm. Stre.*Util. Fail. -,026 ,004 ,043* 8,235
R Square ,635
Adjusted R Square ,627
a. Dependent Variable: Sales
*. Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). **. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
