Resumen de Trust during retail encounters: A touchy proposition
Ulrich R Orth, Tatiana Bouzdine-Chameeva, Kathrin Brand
We examine how a salesperson's touch affects customers' product evaluation. We focus on trust as an important mediator of the touch-evaluation relation. Individual need for touch and culture-specific touching behavior are moderators. Data are obtained from eighteen professionals and 120 consumers in two cultures. The findings support decisions on how to increase trust and product evaluation.
Adopting an interpersonal communication perspective, this study examines the propositions that a salesperson's touch increases trust, which increases product evaluations and purchase intention. These relationships are evaluated in a contact and non-contact culture, with need for touch (NFT) examined as an additional moderator. An exploratory series of in-depth interviews provides an initial understanding of these relationships, followed by a 2 (touch/no touch condition)×2 (consumers in France/Germany) experiment with wine serving as the example category. The findings indicate that touch does not uniformly instill trust in customers. Instead a salesperson's touch relates to greater trust only when consumers have an inherent NFT or when they are from a culture where personal touching behavior is less prevalent. Trust, in turn, relates positively to evaluations of product attractiveness, quality, and to purchase intention.
