Emotional Timescapes: The Temporal Perspective and Consumption Emotions in Services

This exploratory study examines how the temporal aspect of service consumption impacts the emotions that are created within consumers during service encounters. The authors adopted mobile phone or 'SMS' diaries to capture the emotions that participants experienced at the very moment they were being felt or 'in-vivo'. The study suggests that the temporal
perspective is a dominant cause of consumption emotions in services, influencing consumers’ emotions from before the service encounter commences to its conclusion, and in some cases beyond the conclusion of the service event. Other antecedents of consumption emotions such as interactions with staff and the service scape are influenced by, and interwoven with this temporal aspect. By capturing emotions as they were experienced, recall difficulties that might have been encountered had the emotions been measured retrospectively were eliminated, allowing the researchers to construct a comprehensive account of the chronology and contiguity of the emotions created within consumers during service encounters. While certain aspects of time such as the consequences of queuing and waiting have been addressed in the services marketing literature, a detailed understanding of how time impacts consumption emotions in services from the start to the conclusion of service encounters has not been undertaken to date. This research addresses that gap by examining how the temporal perspective influences not only consumption emotions in customers per se but how it also influences other causes of consumption emotions that customers encounter during service transactions.