너의 기쁨이 나의 기쁨?: 구매성공귀인에 따른 긍정적 감정의 양면성

This study aims to investigate the relationship among customer attributions, emotional responses, and behavioral responses in a successful purchase situation and to understand the process of attribution made by customers in terms of success. Prior researches suggested that a successful purchase induces customers to experience positive emotions, which may cause positive behavior. In other words, customers' success may cause positive customer reactions, which can bring success to the company. However, all of the positive emotions experiencing in a successful purchase situation don’t induce positive behavior responses. Customers go through an attribution process for success and can experience different emotions according to what they attribute the success to. These emotions, though being positive, can have different effects on customer behavior. In other words, they can cause behavior, both favorable and unfavorable to the company. So this study aims to question ‘can the customer's pleasure lead to the company's pleasure?’ and to find a way to deal with customers who make behavior unfavorable to the company, despite success. This study intends to present ability, efforts, and salesperson's helping as customer attributions in case of customers' making a successful purchase and competence, relief, and thankfulness as emotional responses to the attributions. This study has the following objectives: First, to understand customer attributions in a successful purchase situation. This study intends to divide attributions of a successful purchase into three categories-ability, efforts, and salesperson's helping-and present the likelihood of the three customer attributions in a successful purchase situation. Second, to determine what emotion is caused according to what the success is attributed to in a successful purchase situation. This study intends to present competence, relief, and thankfulness as emotional responses and determine which attribution causes what emotional response. Third, to determine how emotional responses caused by attributions affect behavioral responses. In other words, this study intends to determine how emotional responses caused by attributions, such as competence, relief, and thankfulness, affect behavior. By doing this, it intends to indicate that even positive emotions may not cause positive customer behavior and to explore the reasons why customers make a behavioral response unfavorable to the company, despite the success. That is, this study tries to question ‘can your (customer's) pleasure lead to my (company's) pleasure?’ and find an answer to this question. This study obtained the following results: First, customers experienced competence in a successful purchase situation when they attributed the success to their ability and experienced relief when they attributed it to their efforts. This result demonstrates that even internal attributions may lead to different emotions according to whether the success is attributed to ability or to efforts. Second, they experienced thankfulness when they attributed the success to salesperson's helping in a successful purchase situation. This result demonstrates that salesperson's positive helping in a customer purchase situation makes it more likely to attribute a successful purchase to the salesperson's helping, thus allowing the customer to experience thankfulness. Third, competence decreased revisit intention and had no impact on word-of-mouth intention. The attribution of a successful purchase to one's own ability makes one experience positive emotions, such as pride and confidence; however, since these emotions result from awareness of one's innate, and possibly persistent, ability, it must be very likely to succeed again in making a choice in the future. This makes it less likely to choose a certain alternative constantly and more likely to do more diverse types of challenging behavior. Ultimately, the intention to revisit the same store may decrease. Competence had no impact on word-of-mouth intention. Contrary to the hypothesis, this result demonstrates that the experience of competence may not lead to positive word-of-mouth to others. It can imply that competence increases the intention to informthe present success through communication with others but doesn't lead to recommendation to visit the store or provision of positive information about the store during this process. In other words, communication with others is simply a channel to inform one's own achievement, not a means to recommend a store. Fourth, relief increased revisit intention and had no impact on word-of-mouth intention. This result demonstrates that the experience of relief may increase the need to keep the psychological balance constant among customers. So it induces them to avoid diverse types of challenging behavior and to choose the same alternative constantly. In other words, it increases revisit intention. However, this result implies that while relief contributes to the constant use of the same alternative, it has no impact on positive recommendation of a store to others. It also implies that relief, which is a psychologically balanced and stable state, causes no intention to make positive communication with others. Fifth, thankfulness increases both revisit intention and word-of-mouth intention. This result demonstrates that the attribution of a successful purchase to the salesperson's helping makes one experience thankfulness, which then increases the need to make a reward through revisit and word-of-mouth. To put the results together, some emotions, though being positive for the customer, may not be positive for the company. In other words, positive emotions during the attribution process for success may or may not cause positive behavior from the corporate perspective. These results provide opportunities to reconsider customers' positive emotions and to give in-depth consideration to the characteristics of positive emotions according to the causes of success and the resultant behavioral aspects.