Eureka! Institutional Repository

This empirical study looks into the growing trend of light food products and investigates the drivers of customer satisfaction with the former type of products. While customer satisfaction has been extensively studied in the literature by employing conventional surveys, this study takes advantage of the social networks’ phenomenal growth to determine empirically the link between customers’ satisfaction and its drivers. Evidence was generated on-line from a sample of 210 respondents drawn among Greek users of the most popular social network, namely Facebook. By doing so, this paper explores the potentials of social networks in customer satisfaction surveysandon-line market data collection. Besides the methodological contribution of the study, the findings suggest that customer satisfaction is not necessarily driven by the social/psychological value of a given light product purchased; instead, it is the perceived product quality, the value for money and the likely time/effort benefits associated with a purchase, that matter most. The findings facilitate managerialunderstanding of the consumers’perspective and help firms become more competitive by placing greateremphasis on utilitarian (rather than social/psychological)values consumers seem to focus on,in this market.