When 3 + 3 does not equal 5 + 1—New insights into the measurement of industrial customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is regarded as a cornerstone of business-to-business marketing. Since organizational purchase decisions are often made by a group of individuals, this issue is a multi-person matter. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between buying center members' individual customer satisfaction judgments and their conjoint buying center satisfaction. Prior research predominantly suggests that there is a linear relationship between individual and buying center satisfaction. Our results, however, show that, contingent on the structure of the individual members' judgments, a non-linear function may reflect this relationship better. In this context, further findings reveal that when individual customer satisfaction judgments are negative, they have a stronger impact on the conjoint satisfaction and on the resulting repurchase intentions than when they are positive.

► Is conjoint buying centers satisfaction a linear or a non-linear function of individuals' customer satisfaction judgments?
► Prior research predominantly suggests that there is a linear relationship between individual and buying center satisfaction.
► We investigate a non-linear aggregation function in the case of heterogeneous individual customer satisfaction judgments.
► Applying the averaging approach when analyzing conjoint buying center satisfaction may yield invalid results.
► Negative individual customer satisfaction judgments have a stronger impact on buying center satisfaction than positive ones.