Do Ordinary Clients Care Privileged Services VIP Clients Hold ? Envy and Its Effects on Brand Relationships

Abstract

To treat the important clients as VIP clients is a common marketing strategy designed with connotation of discriminations in service industry. Privileged services of VIP clients might make ordinary clients feel envy, and such envy might lead to dissolution of brand relationship of ordinary clients who consist of 80% of clients. In this paper, VIP passage and VIP priority were chosen as the main forms of privileged services, and status and expenditure were chosen as the main identification criteria of VIP clients. Then, this paper chose China Mobile and China Unicom as research objects representing different brand stature, and launched a 2 (VIP passage, VIP priority) ×2 (status, expenditure) ×2 (higher stature, lower stature) psychological experiment, so as to examine the degrees of envy incurred by privileged services in different conditions, and envy effects on brand relationships. The results of experiment on service forms suggest that VIP priority will incur a stronger feeling of envy for the reason that it is concerned with benefits of ordinary clients directly. The results of experiment on identification criteria indicate that status criterion will incur a higher inclination to the feeling of envy. The results of experiment indicate that brand stature is an important moderating variable to ordinary clients' envy. The experiment about service forms suggests that envy incurred by VIP priority will lead to a higher inclination to dissolution of brand relationships. The experiment about identification criteria suggests that if a criterion is relevant with clients themselves and can't be easily reached, the criterion will incur envy effects and will be not good for maintenance of brand relationships.