Determinants on Mechanism of Emotional Marketing: Emotional Intelligence, Perception of Emotional Labor' Action, Efficacy and Customer' Coping Strategy on Customer Satisfaction

This study was to examine to identify the determinants on mechanism of emotional marketing in the restaurant business. The previous studied mostly examined to find out the service failure from the service qualities by service employees and by the service facilities. Limited studies were conducted to identify the service failure based on the emotional relationships among customers' emotional intelligence, and interactions to recover service failure from emotional labors as well as from customers.;The purposes of this study were conducted three steps. First, this study examined to identify how different characteristics of customer' characteristics of emotional intelligence such as perceiving emotion, social management, understanding emotion, use of emotion, and managing emotion can interact with 1) customer' perception on emotional labor' acting-out (deep and superficial), 2) customer' efficacy (for self and for other), 3) customer' coping strategy (emotional coping focus and problem coping focus) under unexpected service failure circumstances. Secondly, these three major theoretical constructs were tested to identify the statistical associations with customer' participation and satisfaction. Lastly, the group differences were conducted to test the mean differences between gender in customer' emotional intelligence, ethnicity, nationality and interactions between ethnicity and nationality.;The total of 598 responses was used for the group differences and the final structural equation modeling. Independent samples t-test was used to identify the mean differences between gender, and the Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was conducted to test the vector differences between the two ethnicity groups and nationality origins from the western countries and the eastern countries.;The findings from the group differences explained 1) customer' emotional intelligence has statistical differences between male and female customers, 2) customer' EI had significant meanings in the vector differences among ethnicity, nationality, and interactions of ethnicity and nationality between the western countries and eastern countries. The comparative fit index of the final competing structural model was 0.918, RMSEA = 0.059, thus the overall SEM fit indices were over the cut-off of the powerful model fits. Thus, the this study identified the determinants on mechanism of emotional marketing using the theoretical constructs of EI, emotional labor's action, customer efficacy, coping strategy on customer satisfaction under unexpectedly encountered service failure and the interactions among emotional changes in the service recovery from emotional labors as well as customers. This study contributes to establish theory on how customer' different characters of the EI can associate with different emotional constructs in this studies for hospitality, tourism and service oriented industries.