Consumer Perceived Risk, Involvement and Risk Coping Strategies: A Comparative Study in Product-Service Purchase Situations

Abstract

The literature on services marketing holds that a number of unique characteristics separate services from tangible products. These distinguishing characteristics make service more difficult to evaluate than goods and the knowledge developed from experience in physical product marketing is not sufficient to understand service consumer behaviour. From this ferment this study is designed to examine some consumer behavior related conceptsperceived risk, and consumer involvement (CI) -and risk coping strategies in service purchase situations and compare them withproduct purchase situations. The objectives of the study are (a) to examine whether the differences between product and services influence the degree of association between the perceived risk and the consumer involvement, (b) to investigate whether the differences between product and services influence the consumer s risk coping strategy selection, and (c) to discuss the strategic implications for service marketers. The study is basically an empirical descriptive in nature. A sample survey was conducted with a help of structured questionnaire to collect data. The degree of association between the perceived risk and the consumer involvement was measured by calculating Pearson correlation coefficient. And, the association between the product category and the risk coping strategy selection of consumers was tested by performing Chi-Square test. The results of the tests show that (a) there is a positive relationship between the degree of perceived risk and the consumer involvement in both purchase situations, and (b) the differences between product and services influence the degree of association between the perceived risk and the consumer involvement. The results also show that the coping strategies vary in terms of the degree of perceived risk. The study recommend that services marketers should understand degree of risk the service customers perceive, their degree of involvement and coping strategies to develop their marketing programmes.