The mitigating effect of matching regulatory focus with arousal‐inducing stimuli in service failure situations

Service failures are pivotal touchpoints that can reduce customer satisfaction, encourage negative word‐of‐mouth, and ultimately impact a firm's market share. We advance a novel perspective that after a service failure occurs, matching incidental arousal‐inducing stimuli to one's regulatory orientation can make the negative experience stemming from the service failure less deleterious. In three experiments (two stock out scenarios and one...