Pre-purchase

• Need arousal maybe triggered by: people's unconscious minds (personal identity and aspirations), physical conditions, and external sources (social media or a service firms marketing activities)
• Information search: Evoked set can be derived from past experience or external sources
• External sources: social media, online reviews and searches, advertising retail displays, new stories, and recommendations from service personnel, friends, and family
• Evaluation of alternative services: multi-attribute model to stimulate consumer decision making
• Multi-attribute model: holds that consumer use service attributes that are important to them to evaluate and compare the alternative offerings of firms in their consideration sets
• Multi-attribute model: each attribute has an importance weight. A higher weight means that the attribute is more important
• Service attributes: search attributes, experience attributes, and credence attributes
• Search attributes - tangible characteristics, consumer can evaluate before purchase
• Experience attributes - cannot be evaluated before purchase
• Credence attributes - characteristics that customers find hard to evaluate even after consumption
• Perceived risk is usually greater for services that are high in experience and credence attributes, and first-time users are likely to face greater uncertainty
• The harder it is to evaluate a service, the higher is the perceived risk associated with the purchase decision
• Types of perceived risk: functional, financial, temporal, physical, psychological, social, and sensory
• Functional - unsatisfactory performance outcomes
• Financial - monetary loss, unexpected cost
• Temporal - wasting time, consequences of delays
• Physical - personal injury or damage to possessions
• Psychological - personal fears and emotions
• Social - how others think and react
• Sensory - unwanted effects on any of the five senses
• The perceived risks are low, the alternatives are clear, and they have been used before, the characteristics are easily understood
• Service expectations are formed during the search and decision making process, and they are heavily shaped by information search and evaluation alternatives
• Evaluation of alternative services: multi attribute model, service attributes, perceived risk, service expectation, and purchase decision
• Multi-attribute model

  
• Service Expectation

  
• Service Attributes