Regardless of the great number of academic researches giving prominence to the customer satisfaction, the understanding of what happens to the customer when he/she experiences something beyond satisfaction in post-consumption experience is still incipient. Going beyond satisfaction engenders a deeply positive emotional state regarding the experience of buying or consuming, which is known as customer delight. Although the importance of this construct in the consumer behavior studies, there is still a gap in the understanding about the theme. In this sense, the main goal of this research is to propose and test a scale to measure customer delight, considering the dimensions of the construct and its post-consumption evaluation. Towards such a goal, three consecutive studies were conducted, the first two finetuning the scale and the third performing construct validation. Results suggest content validity, unidimensionality, reliability, convergent validity and discriminant validity of the construct's dimensions. Concluding comments reflect upon the findings and highlight academic and managerial implications for the field, and suggestions for future studies on customer delight are discussed.
consumer behavior; customer satisfaction; customer delight; scale development
