Disconfirmation of Expectations: A Method for Enhancing the Effectiveness of Customer Communications.

Sales managers have long been interested in how to enhance the effect of the sales presentation. Of particular interest is to understand how prospective buyers assess the truthfulness and accuracy of a selling appeal. Attribution theory, as an approach to understanding marketing phenomena, has received a good deal of attention from marketing scholars. Like many models from social psychology, attribution theory makes the assumption that people are driven to understand the causal nature of the world about them. The term attribution refers to the cognitive process that individuals undertake to arrive at causal determinations. Attribution is said to be the process through which individuals interpret events as being caused by particular parts of the relatively stable environment. Disconfirmation serves as an indication to buyers that those factors underlying their biased expectancies are weak or inoperative. The buyer is likely to attribute the cause of the appeal to the "true" dispositional characteristics of the salesperson, so that the appeal seems to reflect the salesperson's actual feelings about the product.