Consumer Complaint Intentions and Behavior: Definitional and Taxonomical Issues

Researchers and practitioners recently have given increasing attention to the antecedents and consequences of postpurchase consumer complaint intentions and behaviors. Issues pertaining to the nature and structure of the consumer complaint behavior (CCB) concept, however, have not received such attention. The author assesses the validity of the three current operationalizations and taxonomies of CCB using intentions data from four different and independent CCB situations. None is an adequate representation of the empirical observations. Consequently a taxonomy is proposed that is based on exploratory analysis of one of the CCB situations. Confirmatory analysis of the other three CCB situations supports the proposed taxonomy. A validity analysis using complaint behavior data for the four CCB situations also supports the proposed CCB taxonomy.