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).