Perceived Value, Emotion and Satisfaction for Family Restaurant Patrons: Does Gender Make a Difference?

The purpose of this study was to understand interrelationships among customers’ perceived values, emotions and satisfaction in family restaurants. Questionnaires were collected from customers in family restaurants in Seoul, the capital of Korea, in 2010. Based on total 472 restaurant patrons obtained from the empirical research, this study reviewed reliability and fitness of research model and verified total 3 hypotheses using Amos program. The results showed that customers’ hedonic and utilitarian values among their perceived value elements had a significant effect on customers’ emotions. In addition, whether these emotions were positive or negative determined customer satisfaction. Moderating effects were related to gender in the causal relationships between customers’ positive or negative emotions originating from the service conditions of family restaurants. Consequently, based on these empirical analyses, it was verified that, from the standpoint of managers, maintaining high-level service contact point factors and providing them to customers would directly affect deriving visible outcomes such as customer satisfaction through enhancing customers’ values and inducing favorable emotional reactions. In particular, by inducing finding ways to induce the values perceived by customers at the service contact points of family restaurants and customers’ emotional reactions, study presents manager-oriented study results necessary for overall management and policy making.