The relationships among consumer satisfaction, involvement, and product performance: A catastrophe theory application

Attempts to model consumer satisfaction/dissatisfaction (CS/D) responses rely on linear assumptions regarding the effect of various causes (e.g., attribute performance, expectancy discontinuation) on the consumer's reaction to a product or service. This assumption has been pervasive in the CS/D literature despite observations in the trade that consumers are sticky in their preferences or „dispreferences”︁ for products. We present and operationalize a model which relaxes the linearity assumption and allows for lagged and threshold effects of performance increments on CS/D responses in product involvement. Our approach uses the cusp catastrophe model, which has been shown to be robust in a number of contexts, but has had only limited use in the marketing literature. We apply a catastrophe model to data on consumers' use of an appetite suppressant and show that, under high involvement conditions for this product, consumers do not shift preferences over a range of reported performance (e.g., weight loss). The catastrophe model is also shown to be superior to a linear (i.e., OLS) model of the same data.