Product details

A trend often overlooked in the small business landscape is the growth of Christian service firms. These small service businesses are owned and operated primarily by evangelical Christians and many clearly identify their businesses in the marketplace as Christian entities. Relatively little is known, however, about the impact of a service provider's Christian identity on various aspects of consumer behavior. Consequently, this research explores the impact of a service provider's Christian marketplace identity on consumer perceptions, including their pre-purchase service expectations and post-purchase perceptions such as satisfaction, repurchase intentions, and word-of-mouth intentions. Using consumer-company identification theory as a base, the research considers whether a service provider's Christian identification might inflate consumer expectations and how such identification might influence satisfaction, repurchase intentions, and word-of-mouth intentions after a service failure. Consumer religiosity levels, ie, weakly vs strongly held evangelical beliefs, and their influence on consumer perceptions are also considered. This research proposes that consumers with stronger evangelical Christian beliefs will identify more with Christian firms and therefore be more forgiving after a moderate service failure than consumers holding weaker evangelical religious beliefs. Consumers with strongly-held evangelical Christian beliefs should then have higher post-purchase perceptions after a moderate service failure than consumers with weaker religious beliefs. Research propositions addressing these and related issues are presented, followed by a discussion of both the research and the managerial implications of Christian marketplace identification for small service firms.