2005/08/16 by Kathryn Hashimoto, Aberdeen Leila Borders · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · Psychology · Mathematics · #Psychology of Social Influence #Customer Service Quality and Loyalty #Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification #Proxemics #Service (business) #Advertising #Space (punctuation) #Product (mathematics) #Marketing #Business #Personality #Destinations #Hospitality #Psychology #Social psychology #Tourism #Computer science #Communication #Geography #Mathematics
paper · doi:10.1300/j073v18n03_05
openalex publication_date 2005/08/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Travelers encounter new sales people as they enter a hotel. Proxemics models suggest that if a seller invades a buyer's intimate space without a relationship, buyers react negatively and withdraw. In addition, the gender of the seller plays a role in the encounter. This study examines the impact of conversational distances and the image of the salesperson on expected satisfaction levels for a new service. The current study does lend support to the theory that social distances are important in developing relationships with the buyer and the personality of the seller has the most impact at intimate distance levels. When gender is added to the conversational distances, there is an added emphasis on the image of the salesperson with social distances reflecting a more positive image for same sex dyads. However, the results remain inconclusive on whether distance impacts the expected product satisfaction levels for a new service. The importance of proxemics and its effect on travelers during the initial sales contact in hotels is a factor in which little scientific study has been done, and yet there are valuable implications for this work.