The Impact of Timing and Bundling Flexibility on Affect-Based Service Package Design

Past research has provided evidence that customers' affective responses to service packages, or bundles, include aspects related to the content of the bundle and the timing of bundle elements, or events. Service design efforts that attempt to maximize these affective responses may be inhibited by the degree to which an event is flexible across time and across contextual fit. This article uses numerical simulation of an artificial problem to test hypotheses about the impact of timing flexibility and contextual-fit flexibility on affect-based design efforts and provides insight about how differing levels of flexibility constrain or enable designers' ability to create bundles and schedules that adhere to behavioral-based design attributes such as the peak, end, trend, and spread effects. Our findings suggest that different kinds of flexibility enable affect-based schedules in different manners, and managers should consider the impact that flexibility will have on successful affect-based scheduling efforts.