Research Of Customer Psychological Contract Based On Customer Delivered Value System

1. Main Contents and ViewpointsNowadays, companies pay more and more intensions to the communication with their customers. Based on that, the paper chooses customer psychological contract as the main subject, trying to research the detailed content of the psychological contract. This paper will design a basic theory framework for that based on the customer delivered value system.The concept of Psychological Contract was advanced since 1960s. However, few researches were on that topic before 1980s. Since the end of 1980s, Psychological Contract has been a hot topic in human resource management areas of both Britain and America. While, however, there are not much research focus on the application of the theory out of the HRM areas.First of all, this paper reviews the Psychological Contract theory and its application to the marketing areas, based on studying a lot of foreign and domestic related papers.The theoretical foundations of the Psychological Contract theory are Social Exchange Theory and Justice Theory. The basic hypothesis is: there is a reciprocal relation between the organization and its employees, and both of the two sides need to pay out and return back. Only when the pays and returns are equal, can the two parties maintain a long stable positive relation.There are two different concepts of Psychological Contract: the classical school believes that the psychological contract exists on both employers and employees'minds; while the Rousseau School considers the employees as the only taker of the psychological contract. Compared both of them, the former concept is the broad sense concept, and the latter is the narrow one. Rousseau and Parks believes that,psychological can basically be separated as two types: transactional psychological contract and relational psychological contract.Based on the marketing theory of Kotler, the core concept of marketing is nothing but Exchange. That's why we believe the psychological contract may exist between the company and its customers.Researches have proved that even in the marketing area, psychological contracts still have the two dimensionalities: transactional psychological contract and relational psychological contract.This paper researches the Customer Psychological Contract based on the Customer Delivered Value System. The bridge connects the two parties is the Exchange point of view.As the core pare of the paper, hypothesis are as follows:1,the psychological contract does exist between the company and its customers in marketing environments;2,the relation between the company and its customers should be reciprocal and equitable exchange;3,considering just from the customers, using the narrow sense of the Psychological Contract theory from the Rousseau School;4,the customers'psychological contract has two dimensionalities: transactional and relational ;5,it is reasonable to choose the Customer Delivered Value System as the researching framework of the Customer Psychological Contract.Based on the above hypothesis, the paper builds up a detailed content about research of the Customer Psychological Contract based on Customer Delivered Value System, from both two sides -- transactional psychological contract and relational psychological contract.After that, this paper creates the E-R-M Module for the Customer Psychological Contract, giving advice on how to establish,maintain and repair the customer psychological contract in different cases.In the end, this paper analyses the actuality of the application of the customer psychological contract, and gives some advice to solve the problems.2. Main ContributionsThis paper uses a lot of theoretical tool, including: Social Exchange Theory of G·Homans; Justice Theory of Adams,Walster; related Psychological Contract theories of Pemberton,Roehling,Lusch,Blancero,Llewellyn; Customer Apperceived Value Theory of Zaithaml; Customer Value Module of Jeanke,Ron,Onno; Customer Value Level Module of Woodruff; Customer Lever Module of Weingand; Customer Delivered Value Theory of Kotler, etc. Based on those theories, this paper creates the framework of Customer Psychological Contract from the Customer Delivered Value theory.The biggest innovation of the paper is connecting customer psychological contract with customer delivered value by the reciprocal exchange relations.Here are the main contributions of the paper:(1) Reviewing the research of the Psychological Contract and its application in marketing area;(2)Expanding the application of the Psychological Contract theory in marketing areas—researching both on the framework and the detailed content;(3) Researching the Customer Psychological Contract based on the Customer Delivered Value System;(4) Helping companies know better about the customer demands and found long stable relations.