Vipada Charoensuk

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategic business management tool used to retain customers and enhance business profitability. To successfully employ CRM, food service providers must acquire knowledge about consumer attitudes. Insights into elements influencing evaluations of a dining-out experience may benefit restaurant managers since it allows them to better understand what determines consumers' needs and expectations. This research provides a better understanding of the relationship between consumers' personality characteristics and food taste attitudes in a dining-out environment. By proposing and testing a theoretical taste complexity attitude model, the research addresses gaps in both the personality theory and sensory marketing strands of the consumer behaviour parent discipline literature. Research into the relationships among consumers' personality characteristics, the effect of dining-out atmospherics and consumers' taste complexity attitudes has not been reported in the literature. Consequently, the research in this study was designed to address the question: How do personality characteristics relate to consumer taste complexity attitudes in a dining-out food consumption environment? During the development of the proposed model, Role of Personality in Development of Taste Complexity Attitude, knowledge drawn from personality theory and sensory marketing theory was integrated into the proposed model.

Considering the durability of the Big Five as a construct in both marketing and consumer behaviour psychology and the wealth of studies showing significant links between one or other of the five factors, it could have been anticipated that this study would have unearthed greater and more significant relationships between the Big Five, taste complexity and attitudes towards aspects of atmospherics. This research discovered that there is a positive relationship between Agreeableness and Conscientiousness personality characteristics and taste complexity attitude. In the case of conscientiousness, however, that relationship only approached significance. Other relationships were nonsignificant. A priori, on the basis of information reported in Section 2.3.4, it could have been anticipated that neuroticism (which is characterised by moodiness, anxiety and fear) would have an interesting relationship with both atmospherics and taste complexity, but no relationship was found. Since extraversion (characterised by association with risk, venturesomeness and sociability) (Richardson & Saliba, 2011; Saliba, Wragg & Richardson, 2000; Elfhag & Erlanson-Albertsson, 2006), it would have been reasonable to expect significant relationships between this variable and both attitude to taste complexity and aspects of dining-out atmospherics. This study failed to uncover such relationships. Finally, openness is considered to be a variable made up of a number of characteristics that include a preference for variety and curiosity, and these characteristics would appear to be quite directly related to attitudes to taste complexity (Dollinger, 1993).