Relative contributions of product quality and service quality in the automobile industry

This paper answers two key research questions: 1) What is the relationship between product quality and service quality on customer satisfaction within an integrated model? 2) What is the relationship between customers' satisfaction and customers' intention to switch brands in the automobile industry? PLS-SEM is a tool used to assess measurement reliability and validity and to estimate the relationships among service quality, product quality, customers' satisfaction, and customers' intention to switch brands. Results show that service quality does not significantly determine customer satisfaction. Instead, product quality significantly influences customer satisfaction. The findings contrast a prior Quality Management Journal study conducted in the mobile phone industry that found that provider service quality is relatively more important than product quality. The results also show that customer satisfaction has a negative effect on customers' intention to switch brands. This research contributes to the ongoing debate surrounding service-dominant (S-D) logic and goods-dominant (G-D) logic of exchanges by empirically supporting the G-D logic in the context of the automobile industry. The study suggests future modification to the traditional quality-satisfaction model based on the type of product.