Expectation and disconfirmation

Richard L. Oliver · 1980

Satisfaction is not what you delivered; it is what you delivered measured against what was expected.

Its place in the frameworkBrand Core›Brand promise

What it does

The same experience satisfies one person and disappoints another because they arrived expecting different things — and a brand promise is precisely the instrument that sets the expectation. It follows that an overstated promise damages a good product, and that raising quality without touching the promise raises satisfaction more cheaply than raising both.

Reach for it when: When deciding how much to promise, and when a genuinely good product keeps producing disappointed customers.
Where it stops: Expectations are formed by far more than your marketing — competitors, category norms, the last unrelated thing that went well. You set part of the reference point, not all of it.

Richard L. Oliver, “A Cognitive Model of the Antecedents and Consequences of Satisfaction Decisions”, Journal of Marketing Research, 1980.

Why it sits at Brand promise

The commitment the organisation makes to the people it serves — what they can expect every time, stated plainly enough that failing to deliver it would be noticed.

A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:

The promiseBerry’s work on service branding: the promise as the organising commitment a service brand is built around.
DeliverabilityThe service-quality gap model of Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry, in which the gap between what is promised externally and what is delivered is one of the named failures.
CommunicationExpectancy-disconfirmation theory: satisfaction as the distance between expectation and experience rather than as an absolute property of the experience.
Keeping itService recovery research, which finds that how a failure is handled affects loyalty more than whether it occurred.

All of Brand promise

What it touches elsewhere

Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Brand promise lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.

Goal CoreThe promise should be recognisable as purpose turned outward and made specific enough to fail.
Business CoreDeliverability is settled here in operations and cost, not in the wording.
Omni CoreThe promise is kept or broken at the touchpoints, which is where the experience is actually designed.
Data CoreWhether it was kept is a measurement, and it needs collecting like any other.

Filed at the same place

These answer questions that arise at Brand promise too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.

The brand resonance pyramidBrand strength is built in order: who you are, what you offer, what people think and feel, and only then loyalty.

Elsewhere in Brand Core

These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.

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