Beyond love and breakup: integrating intervention letters for nuanced insights into consumer-robot relationships

The Love and Breakup Letter Method (LBM) is a valuable qualitative technique for exploring consumer-brand relationships, but its dichotomous nature may overlook nuanced consumer sentiments. This study proposes a modification to the LBM by introducing an “intervention letter” category, allowing participants to express a desire to contribute to product or service improvement. We applied this modified method to investigate customer relationships with service robots in the hotel industry. Findings revealed a significant preference for the intervention letter (52.72%), surpassing both love letters (38.18%) and breakup letters (9.09%), highlighting consumers’ active engagement and desire for co-creation. Time taken to write Intervention Letters was also significantly longer, indicating deeper engagement. Linguistic analysis using LIWC-22 further distinguished the letter types. Intervention letters demonstrated the highest Analytic score, reflecting a task-oriented approach, and less self-focus compared to love and breakup letters, which had higher authenticity and emotionality, respectively. Word frequency analysis revealed distinct lexical patterns: Love Letters emphasized emotional terms like “love,” “heart,” and “moment,” while Intervention Letters focused on practical terms such as “guests,” “service,” and “improve.” Notably, “moment” appeared much more frequently in Love Letters, underscoring their focus on specific emotional experiences. This modified LBM offers a more comprehensive understanding of consumer experiences, particularly the desire for constructive engagement, and fosters deeper connections between consumers and brands, benefiting both researchers and industry practitioners.