Consumers expect more warmth from small companies, and will punish you if you don’t deliver, new research has found.
How company size changes expectations
Do consumers have different expectations of how they’ll be treated by a business according to its size? Yes.
In a forthcoming paper, researchers Yang and Aggarwal (2018) investigated how “perceptions of a company’s relative size influences perceptions of its power, which in turn drives consumers’ expectations and subsequent preferences”.
Their guess was that customers would expect small companies to be warm and friendly, whereas larger firms would not be held to the same standard.
Why? It all has to do with power.
Small companies are perceived to have lower power and, as a result, assumed to be more reliant on nurturing customer relationships in order to prosper. That leads customers to expect them to exhibit a higher level of “communion behaviours” (i.e. caring for the needs of individuals). Larger firms, on the other hand, have higher power and can operate with less consideration of their customers. Read more
Bri Williams - Startup Smart - 18 May 2018
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