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THE IMPACT OF HUMOR IN ANNOUNCEMENTS ON SERVICE CUSTOMER’S INTENTION TO COMPLY WITH THE ANNOUNCEMENT
Service customers influence the quality of service outcome through their role in the service delivery process. As a way of informing customers of their role and motivating customers to play the role well, service providers often use auditory announcements. However, how to design an effective announcement for service customers still remains largely under-studied. To fill this gap in the research, the current study examines the impact of humor in a service announcement on customer intention to comply with the announced message. Specifically, we examine the impact of two humor design factors: location of humor in the announcement and the degree of message-relatedness of the humor. Further, we explore the structure of the impact of humor on customer intention to comply. We propose that the two design elements of humor will first influence the degree of customer perceptions of funniness of the announcement, which will influence the degrees of customer attention to the announcement and customer memory of the message, which will eventually influence customer intention to comply with the message. To empirically examine our hypotheses, we conducted a two (positions of humor: beginning versus ending of the announcement) by two (message relatedness of humor: strong versus weak) between-subject experiment. The context of our experiment was college students’ course evaluation. In the message, listeners were asked to participate in an online evaluation of the course which they were taking. Pre-recorded messages were played to students at the beginning of five different sections of one particular course at a business school in a major university in Seoul, Korea. The results of an ANCOVA analysis demonstrated the significant impact of both humor position in the message and the message-relatedness of the humor. A structural equation modeling analysis showed that perceived funniness influence customer attention to the announcement but not customer memory of the message. The degree of customer attention, in turn, influenced customer intention to comply with the announced message.
