Balance in the (Re)Making: a Deep Metaphor Analysis of Consumer Recovery Expectations

The service literature presents an intriguing contradiction with regard to consumers’ service recovery expectations. It is clear that consumers hold expectations of recovery in the wake of failure. On the other hand, the literature tells us that most firms do not recover well (as few as five percent even try). We conducted depth interviews based on the ZMET protocol (Zaltman 1997) with 24 informants to understand the deeper sources of consumers’ recovery expectations that enable this resilient hope in the face of disconfirming experience. We find that recovery expectations are grounded in the deep metaphor of balance and the cultural codes of atonement and reconciliation built upon that embodied cognition.

Citation:

Glenn Christensen and Torsten Ringberg (2005) ,"Balance in the (Re)Making: a Deep Metaphor Analysis of Consumer Recovery Expectations", in E - European Advances in Consumer Research Volume 7, eds. Karin M. Ekstrom and Helene Brembeck, Goteborg, Sweden : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 440-441.