Keeping up appearances: service environments as symbolic communication

“All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players” (Shakespeare, 1599) Like actors in a play, service providers play their parts in front of an audience. Spectators base their perceptions and evaluations on a wide variety of cues that include the performance of the actors, costumes and the décor. In this dissertation, the décor of service encounters is considered a means of symbolic communication. In service settings such as hospitals, an advertising agency, and a restaurant, we show how consumers infer beliefs about service providers, service attributes, and service firms from environmental cues. The results stress the importance of the environment as a tool to express and reaffirm ones (desired) identity.