The Effect of Customer Satisfaction on Consumer Spending Growth

Abstract

Predicting aggregate consumer spending is vitally important to marketing planning, yet traditional economic theory holds that predicting changes in aggregate consumer spending is not possible. Previous attempts to predict consumer spending growth using standard macroeconomic predictor variables have met with little success. The authors show that the lagged change in customer satisfaction, which contributes to future demand, has a significant impact on spending growth. However, this impact is moderated by increases in consumers' debt service ratio, a key budget constraint that affects consumers' ability to spend. Using an asymmetric growth model, more than 23% of the variation in the one-quarter-ahead spending growth is explained, which represents a notable improvement over prior specifications.