Customer traffic and customer experience: Creating a contrived similarity to address the crowding dilemma

Improving customers’ experiences by reducing their negative reactions to a crowded environment continues to be a challenge for brick-and-mortar stores. Drawing from the social identity theory, this research proposes that stores could mitigate customers’ crowding perceptions in a high customer density environment by creating a contrived similarity shared among customers that is assigned, observable, and trivial. A total of seven studies (N = 3,343), including two field experiments, one simulated study, and four online experiments, affirm the contrived similarity effect on alleviating customers’ perceptions of crowding when customer density is high, and this effect is mediated by eliciting a situational in-group identification among customers and moderated by customers’ perceived self-uncertainty. This research enriches the literatures on crowding and similarity, as well as social identity theory. Its results also provide implications for service managers facing the crowding dilemma, who must find ways to manage customer traffic and customer experience effectively.