Role of customer tenure. Customer tenure, defined as
the length of the customer relationship with the firm at the time of participation in a CRP, may explain why some customers are less affected than others by participation in a CRP. Our reasoning is based on self-perception theory (Bem 1972), which explains that, in certain situations, people learn about their inner states (i.e., attitudes) by observing their own overt behavior and the situational cues surrounding it (Fazio, Herr, and Olney 1984). When customers hear themselves recommending a product or service, they may conclude that they like it because otherwise they would not have made a recommendation (East, Lomax, and Narain 2001; Gamefeld, Helm, and Eggert 2011).
However, only in the absence of stronger cues do freely performed behaviors toward an object offer a highly indicative reflection of its evaluation (Fazio, Herr, and Olney 1984). Therefore, attitude expressions based on self-perception processes should occur primarily for people with weaker prior attitudes toward the object (Chaiken and Baldwin
1981). Attitude strength can be defined as the "positivity or negativity (valence) of an attitude weighted by the confidence or certainty with which it is held" (Park et al. 2010, p.
1). Consequently, people can hold similarly favorable attitudes about an object but differ with regard to how certain they are (Rajagopal and Montgomery 2011). Longer-tenured customers are more likely to have formed strong attitudes about the firm before CRP participation than are shortertenured customers, because research has found knowledge about and direct experience with the attitude object to be important drivers of attitude strength (Krosnick et al. 1993; Marks and Kamins 1988). Thus, participation should have a stronger impact on the behavior of customers with shorter tenure, because they have weaker attitudes toward the firm at the time of CRP involvement.