Exchange-Specific Self-Disclosure, Social Self-Disclosure, and Personal Selling

Abstract

The self-disclosures of customers and salespeople can be either exchange-specific (i.e., essential to a pending exchange) or social (i.e., incidental to a pending exchange). A model that relates both types of self-disclosure to consumers’ trust in a salesperson, consumers’ satisfaction with a salesperson, consumers’ attraction to a salesperson, and consumers’ commitment to future business, is posited and tested with data collected during a controlled meeting between married couples and insurance agents (ndyads =116). Because both types of self-disclosure are significant predictors of customers’ commitment to future business, salespeople should monitor the form and quantity of their self-disclosures and the disclosures they elicit from customers. Specifically, to maximize customers’ commitment to future business, salespeople should try to maximize customers’ social disclosures and minimize customers’ exchange-specific disclosures; obversely, salespeople should minimize their social disclosures and maximize their exchange-specific disclosures.