Self- VS Traditional:Research On Implicit Attitudes Of Consuming Style

The intense competition in the service industry and development of science and technology contribute to the prosperity in self-service technology, which is used to replace manual service in more and more industries to earn consumers’favor. ATM machines, ticket vending machines, online banking and telephone language systems are typical examples. According to Meuter(2002), self-service refers to a kind of technology interface which produce service by customers themselves rather than service personnel. Based on former researches, using self-service can improve the speed of service delivery, reduce costs, improve efficiency and customer satisfaction, develop customer loyalty, and differentiate from competitors through technological edge. However, despite those advantages, there exists unimaginable difficulties when companies seek to manage and optimize self-service technology. To this end, there is a need to understand the mechanism of self-service and the real thoughts of consumers. How does self-service win consumers? What can consumers feel when experiencing self-service? What’s their attitude toward self-service? We try to find the answers in this article.This article focuses on the perspective of consumer. Variables include gender, educational background, age, income, region and the length of time of using internet. The paper explores the benefits of self-service and consumer’s psychological perception of it, our creative use of Implicit Association Test can help to analyze the differences of implicit attitude toward self-service among groups of people.According to the conclusion, all of gender, income and experience of using internet have effects on implicit attitude of consumers, while none of educational background, age and region can affect it. Specifically, female with high income and rich experience of using internet shows preference for self-service, men whose income is low and didn’t using internet much prefer to manual service. By studying different attitudes of consumers from their intrinsic motivation, we suggest that companies should attach importance to the intrinsic side of customers when develop self-service. In the end of the paper, we also discusses the future research of self-service.