Psychological Effects of Restaurant Meetings on Industrial Buyers

Abstract

Previous research has assessed industrial buyers' opinions of restaurant meetings with sales representatives but failed to clarify what settings are advantageous from a sales standpoint (Dempsey, Bushman, and Plank 1980; Halvorson and Rudelius 1977). This experiment involving 211 purchasing personnel examines the impact of different restaurant meeting settings on industrial buyers' reactions to three user-versus-supplier problems. In a design where the environment of a buyer-seller meeting and the nature of user-supplier purchase problems were manipulated, it was found that an ordinary, unpretentious restaurant meeting caused more favorable evaluations than a nonroutine, fancy restaurant meeting.