Title: Consumer satisfaction attribute mapping in hospitality industry through ZMET

Authors: Shuvam Chatterjee; Mrinalini Pandey

Addresses: School of Management, IMS Unison University, Dehradun, India ' School of Management, IIT (ISM), Dhanbad, India

Abstract: The paper focuses on understanding brand awareness of consumers from an embedded cognitive state. Consumer's decision making for a brand mainly results from both conscious and non-conscious experiences that a consumer is been exposed to. Consumers preserve these brand knowledge and awareness in a non-conscious level of their mind. Marketers depend upon use of multi-sensory metaphors to bring out that digged-in knowledge. The researcher introduces ZMET as a method to elicitate hidden understanding about a consumer's decision making process by stimulating various human senses and understanding about the attributes that ultimately contributes in consumer decision making. The research would throw light on a qualitative example considering a hospitality industry by identifying the hidden metaphors that contribute in understanding the consumer's satisfaction for experiencing a particular service. This paper concludes with implications mainly for marketers so that they could better identify the decision making factors for consumers in the hospitality industry.

Keywords: consumer loyalty; hospitality industry; fragrance marketing; ZMET; relationship patterns; attribute mapping.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIR.2019.101691

International Journal of Business Innovation and Research, 2019 Vol.20 No.1, pp.87 - 105

Received: 12 Oct 2017
Accepted: 05 Apr 2018
Published online: 21 Aug 2019 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article