Emotional Suppression as a Moderator for the Impact of a Transgression on Consumers’ Satisfaction

Despite the increasing amount of research about the effects of a seller’s transgression on consumers’ relationship quality evaluation, existing theory still demands more insight into consumer’s capacity to suppress the negative emotions that a transgression might generate. This research proposes that consumers’ are not always equally influenced by a transgression because some individuals demonstrate a higher capacity to suppress the negative emotions that arise from a seller’s transgression. An experimental study in a controlled virtual bookstore was developed, simulating a real website. Participants were randomly allocated into one of the two conditions: transgression vs. non-transgression scenario. We demonstrate that consumers who are better able to suppress the negative emotions experienced a lower decrease in their satisfaction evaluation of the relationship with the seller after a transgression than those who had a lower negative emotion suppression capacity following the behavior. These results shed light into the boundary conditions of the transgressions in the business to consumer marketing relationship. This research is therefore intended to make contributions to the literature of marketing relationship in a transgression context.