A Comparison of the Effects of the First Impression and the Last Impression in a Selling Context

A plethora of studies in psychology, communication and advertising indicate that the first and last phases of an event are predominant in customer evaluations. Many practitioners also argue that the first and the last impressions made by an advisor in a selling context have the most important influence on clients' evaluations. However, few researchers have studied this phenomenon in the marketing literature. We conducted a survey of more than 500 clients. Following structural equation modeling analyses, our results indicate that perceived quality and trust were found to be influenced by the initial impression, whereas satisfaction was mostly impacted by the final impression. Several managerial recommendations and research avenues are presented in this article.