Jump into the negative enjoyment

Abstract

Nowadays, the negative enjoyment stays a concept which is still unknown for many people and companies. Contrary, customer satisfaction importance is commonly recognized, thanks to the profits it can generate for companies. In this domain, positive emotions’ impact on satisfaction is often acknowledged. But much less is known about the influence of negative emotions or they are often simply perceived as negatively impacting the satisfaction. Furthermore, companies have still more to face strong competition in a fast-moving world. In this context, companies need more than ever to differentiate themselves and find ways to increase their profits. Better understand customer satisfaction and how to provide him or her a better customer experience, in surfing on the wave of the hedonist market trend, seems thereby really interesting for companies. The negative enjoyment seemed thereby still to be an understudied concept, which could allow customers to experience satisfaction thanks to negative emotions. This is why, this topic was interesting from both managerial and scientific perspectives.

To approach this topic, we designed an exploratory study, as an initial research, with as purpose to make a first step in the investigation of this new and ambiguous domain of research.

To lead this research, we had defined a qualitative research designed based on two coupled methodologies, namely the CIT and functional methods and two collection data tools, namely the interviews and field observations.

We have defined the following managerial question: “How could marketers, from the customer point of view, create a better customer experience in hedonic services aiming to elicit negative emotions?” And a related research question: “How could negative emotions lead to customer satisfaction?” And two propositions to investigate our topic. Namely, the “Fear is a negative emotion that can generate customer satisfaction” (P1). And our second proposition was that “Negative emotion arising from extraordinary experience can be the source of customer satisfaction” (P2).

We partially reached our objectives. Firstly, from a managerial point of view, we discover that companies could use the negative enjoyment as an effective differentiation tool. They could generate a better customer experience in generating customer satisfaction in using the negative enjoyment in specific contexts such as in extraordinary experiences. Secondly, from a scientific point of view, we have refined the problem and made some first findings, explaining that the customer could experience satisfaction thanks to negative enjoyment if his emotional expectations were full filled even if these ones were based on negative feeling. But a lot remains to be learned.