A research on determining the role of cabin attendants' attractiveness on perceived service quality in airline service delivery through neuromarketing techniques

With the increasing competition from the deregulation in 1978 until today, airline companies have used a number of tools to gain a competitive advantage. Service quality, one of these tools, has been very beneficial for airline companies to maintain profitability and increase market share. As such, airline companies need to reveal the factors that affect service quality and to make some improvements and regulations by focusing on these factors. This study focuses on the role of attractiveness levels of cabin attendants, which is one of the factors that affect service quality in airlines and which is frequently discussed in the literature, on the perceived service quality. In contrast to earlier studies examining the effect of attractiveness level on service quality, this study employed the frontal asymmetry approach utilizing the EEG technique, one of the neuromarketing methods. Frontal alpha asymmetry metric results from electrode pairs (F4, F8, AF4, FC6) and (F3, F7, AF3, FC5) were calculated in the experiment, which was performed by recruiting 37 participants. As a result, it has been found that a cabin attendant with a high level of attractiveness increases the motivation to approach in the participants and that attractiveness can be a factor that increases the perceived service quality. The EEG results obtained in this study were also compared with the results of the survey application, and a statistical difference was found. The findings of this research showed that the frontal asymmetry approach could be an alternative for determining the role of nonverbal characteristics such as attractiveness on perceived service quality and that the neuromarketing method can be used to validate the results obtained from traditional research methods.