The Delineation and Interactions of Normative and Predictive Expectations in Customer Satisfaction and Emotions

The importance of understanding and meeting customer expectations has long been recognized in the marketing literature. Scholars acknowledge the existence of various types of expectations, and there is a growing interest in the normative and predictive types; however, many aspects of their differences and connections remain unclear. A lack of clear distinction between normative and predictive expectations is fairly typical in the literature. This leads to deficiencies in recommendations for practitioners, and it hinders the development of richer, more comprehensive theory by researchers and scholars. This article aims to remove some of confusion by carefully examining normative and predictive expectations with a focus on their differences and interactions in generating customer satisfaction and emotions.