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Introduction
If you're grateful for something then you'll appreciate it; if you appreciate something then you'll care for it; if you care for something then you will (more than likely) get more of it.
To grow in business and in life, show gratitude and appreciation
- Bowyer (2013), Forbes , 27 November.
Consumers frequently experience gratitude - a positive reaction to receiving a benefit provided by the good intentions of another (Fredrickson, 2009; Tsang, 2006), and marketers are taking notice. The popular press publishes articles illustrating the motivating force of gratitude and though not as abundant, academic research on customer gratitude has begun to flourish, as well. In the past decade, the growth of gratitude research has spanned across leading marketing journals, including the Journal of Marketing , Journal of Consumer Research , Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science , Journal of Business Research , Journal of Service Research , Journal of Services Marketing , Journal of Public Policy & Marketing and Psychology & Marketing , showing both the relevance and importance of gratitude in diverse areas of marketing (Huang, 2015; Long-Tolbert and Gammoh, 2012; Morales, 2005; Palmatier et al. , 2009; Raggio and Folse, 2009, 2011; Soscia, 2007; Xia and Kukar-Kinney, 2013).
Although customer gratitude is a growing topic of interest among scholars, the current state of the literature is problematic because there lacks a clearly accepted definition and subsequent measure of gratitude. To clarify, gratitude research is broadly divided on whether the construct is studied as either a state or trait. Even further diversity lies within both of these classifications. For instance, scholars studying gratitude as a state might consider it an emotion, a moral affect, a coping response or an attitude (Emmons and McCullough, 2003). Moreover, the exact properties within each of these state-based conceptualizations varies, as some scholars consider gratitude as maintaining affective and behavioral properties, but other scholars consider gratitude as having affective and cognitive properties (Palmatier et al. , 2009; Weiner, 1985). Similar to research on brand love (Batra et al. , 2012), we contend that the diversity in gratitude definitions stems from failing to conduct exploratory research on consumers' experiences to set the construct's boundaries and domain. Therefore, this paper addresses this issue by providing a...