Original title: The dark side of marketing deception: a multidimensional analysis of customer punitive intentions and switching behaviour
The study looks at customers who used Facebook to search for or buy hospitality services in Egypt. It treats deception in products, prices, distribution, and promotion as parts of the same problem. Customers who perceived more deception were more likely to want to switch providers and to want to punish the business. Wanting to switch partly explains the link between deception and punitive intentions, but does not explain all of it.
Imagine booking a table after seeing a restaurant’s menu and prices. If the meal or bill turns out to be misleading, you may decide to eat somewhere else, but leaving may not be the only response. In this paper, the misleading offer is the problem, choosing another provider is the decision to switch, and wanting to punish the business is a further response.
For hotels, restaurants, and travel businesses, misleading customers may do more than cost a booking: it can also raise the chance of punitive responses. The findings point to customer trust as a practical concern for hospitality managers, though the study does not specify which punitive actions customers take.
The abstract reports questionnaire responses from customers in Egypt who used Facebook in connection with hospitality services. It does not establish whether the findings apply to other countries, customer groups, or industries, or whether stated intentions lead to actual switching or punitive actions. It also does not specify which punitive behaviours customers had in mind.
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The dark side of marketing deception: a multidimensional analysis of customer punitive intentions and switching behaviour — Manal A. Ghoneim, Wageeh A. Nafei, Abdallah M. Elshaer et al. — Frontiers in Communication — doi:10.3389/fcomm.2026.1886907
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.