“How satisfied are customers with our service?” “We want to exceed our customers’ expectations.” “We need to discover what is important to our customers.” “Are our customers more loyal than our competitors’ customers?” “We need to improve our product quality.”
How can we as marketers answer these questions if the concepts in the questions—satisfaction, expectations, importance—are vague or ambiguous? Your first thought is likely to associate the term concept with the words “things” or “ideas.” For example, “loyalty” and “satisfaction” are ideas. A “customer” and “products” are “things.” But this begs the following questions: “What is an idea? What is a thing?”
In a broader sense, “concepts” encompass “things” and “ideas,” and are major building blocks of communication along with other parts of speech that we learned in grammar school such as verbs, adjectives, and prepositions. It is this broader definition that we apply in the context of this book. But, “what really is a concept?” Let’s take a look.
First, you need to appreciate the fact that the word “concept” has deep roots in the philosophy of science and linguistics. It is a highly complex topic. Consequently, the objective of this Think Better piece is to help you gain an appreciation for the complexity of concepts in general and marketing concepts in particular, so that when you use them in future marketing communications, you’ll do a good job of defining them.
A concept categorizes a certain aspect of reality. For example, the term chair is a concept. The aspects of reality it includes are certain objects we sit on. We include in the category “chair” such objects as an Adirondack chair, an armchair, a Captain’s chair, a folding chair, and so on. A “concept” is defined by its properties. Some properties of a chair include: one or more legs or leg-type structures supporting a seating area, a back support; a seating area parallel to the ground on which one bends slightly to sit down. If an object possesses these properties, we call it a chair. It is much easier to ask someone for a chair than it is to ask someone for an object that combines each of its properties. And of course, each property is itself a concept. Consequently, it is impossible to communicate without concepts.
So let’s take a common concept we deal with as marketers: “satisfaction.” Often, marketers will define “satisfaction” to mean “when a customer is satisfied.” But this is not a good definition because the term satisfaction is used to define the concept “satisfaction.” It’s kind of like saying “hot” means “hot.” Also, this definition does not help us understand what the properties of “satisfaction” are, the way that the definition of “chair” tells us what the properties of a chair are. And before you try to second guess what the definition of “satisfaction” is, we’ll tell you right now that the definition is complicated and not everyone in marketing agrees about what it is!1 Don’t feel bad. There are undoubtedly those who would argue over our definition of “chair” also. However, this does not mean that we suggest throwing our hands up in despair because it’s impossible to agree on the definitions of a given term. It does mean that, in defining concepts, the parties involved must take the time to develop good definitions before seeking to take action on the concept (e.g., to improve customer “satisfaction”).
Originally, marketer’s definitions of “satisfaction” focused on the issue of customer expectations, where expectation is defined as a forecast of performance. For example, if you expect to wait in line for two minutes at a bank teller’s drive-up window, and you only wait one minute, your expectation is disconfirmed positively—your wait is less than your forecast—and, as a result, you experience positive satisfaction. Conversely, if you wait three minutes, your expectation is disconfirmed negatively, and you experience negative satisfaction. In a sense, it is this disconfirmation and whether it is positive or negative that is “satisfaction.” In other words, one way to define “satisfaction” without using the term satisfaction is to say that satisfaction is the difference between (i.e., the disconfirmation of) forecasted and actual product performance at a particular point in time. Note: this definition can be extended to include the product or service as a whole, or certain aspects of a product of service.
Alternative definitions of satisfaction might focus on (a) this concept’s emotional component, such as whether a customer “likes” a product, or (b) the extent to which a product meets a customer’s needs and wants. The Giese and Cote article cited in the endnote of this discussion identifies 20 different definitions of satisfaction found in the recent marketing literature.
The point we’re making is that “satisfaction” is a complicated concept, there are different ways of defining it, and the different ways of defining it affect how an organization measures satisfaction and ultimately answers the question, “How do we improve customer satisfaction?” If the brand manager is using definition #3—a customer “likes” a product—and the sales manager is using definition #14—a product exceeds a customer’s “expectation”—you can see where problems can arise! For example, a customer may “like” a product, but the product does not exceed the customer’s forecast of product performance.
The question of “What definition of satisfaction should management focus on?” is even more complicated than suggested in the foregoing discussion. Some researchers have pointed out that satisfied customers do not always purchase the same brand over time; and that a more useful concept for management is “loyalty,” not “satisfaction.”2 But this begs the question, “How do you define loyalty?” Some researchers define it as the percentage of times a consumer purchases a target brand over a given time period. Others define it as the likelihood a consumer will purchase a target brand in the future. Just as for the “satisfaction” concept, there are many definitions of “loyalty.”
So let’s return to our definition of a concept. It is easy to see that an object like a chair has physical properties that can be observed—legs, a sitting surface, and a back support. Although it is possible to debate which of those properties should be used in describing the concept of a chair, we can at least see what we are debating. But what are the properties of mental states such as “satisfaction”? As an example, let’s go back to our earlier definition: the difference between forecasted and actual product performance at a given point in time. The properties of this definition of satisfaction are as follows:
Time: Satisfaction occurs at a particular point in time when a product is used or consumed; say at time “t.”
Forecasted performance: A forecast of the perceived performance of a product at time “t.”
Actual performance: The perceived product performance at time “t.”
Difference: The subtraction of the perceived performance measure from the forecasted performance measure.
These properties of “satisfaction,” therefore, are used to define that term.
The process of defining the properties of marketing concepts is both complex and difficult, but we don’t mean to imply that to be a good critical marketing thinker you need to have a PhD in marketing and be familiar with the marketing literature on concept development. But you do need to appreciate that these concepts are multifaceted and when you use them in drafting, say, a marketing strategy, you need to have some sense of this complexity and some basis for choosing the particular definition of a concept that you’re using.
You and your team will benefit from agreeing on the definitions of concepts such as “satisfaction” or “importance” before using them to measure your business’ performance. A good starting point for further learning is to get your hands on a good marketing text book. We recommend Byron Sharp’s (2013) Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice, Oxford University Press. If you want to pursue this topic in greater detail, we additionally recommend reading the following:
Grapentine, Terry (2015), “Get what I mean? How to think about constructs in marketing research,” Quirks Marketing Research Review, August, pp. 40–46.
Kerlinger, Fred N., and Howard B. Lee (2000), Foundations of Behavioral Research, 4th Edition, Harcourt College Publishers, New York, especially Chapter 3: Constructs, Variables, and Definitions, pp. 41–62.
Zaltman, Gerald, Chrstian R. A. Pinson, and Reinhard Angelmar (1973), Metatheory and Consumer Research, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, p. 22.
Bottom line: poorly defined concepts = muddled thinking.