Words, Words, mere words? An analysis of service customers' perception of evaluative concepts

The purpose of this article is to investigate the meaning that service customers attach to the concept of quality and to four other concepts related to service evaluation: satisfaction, performance, attitude, and value. The service and the consumer behavior literature have devoted a lot of attention to the definition and positioning of these concepts. Nevertheless, it cannot be taken for granted that these theoretical distinctions are clearly perceived by customers, and that if some differences are perceived, they are similar to those formulated by researchers. The authors believe this issue is important, since conceptual clarity affects both the accumulation of knowledge as well as the validity of measures. By crossing different sources, the literature and the results of a qualitative study on service customers, the authors present a synthesis of the meaning that researchers and customers attribute to the aforementioned concepts. Results show that customers posses a fine-grained perception of the different concepts and that there is a good convergence between the literature and the customers’ view. However, respondents also focus on some dimensions that are still overlooked by researchers, therefore providing additional contribution to the understanding of the meaning of quality and of the other evaluative concepts.