Psychological effects of restaurant meetings on industrial buyers

Previous research has assessed industrial buyers' opinions of restaurant meetings with sales representatives but failed to clarify what settings are advantageous from a sales standpoint (Dempsey, Bushman, and Plank 1980; Halvorson and Rudelius 1977). This experiment involving 211 purchasing personnel examines the impact of different restaurant meeting settings on industrial buyers' reactions to three user-versus-supplier problems. In a design where the environment of a buyer-seller meeting and the nature of user-supplier purchase problems were manipulated, it was found that an ordinary, unpretentious restaurant meeting caused more favorable evaluations than a nonroutine, fancy restaurant meeting.