Paul H. Schurr & Bobby J. Calder Psychological Effects of Restaurant Meetings on Industrial Buyers Previous research has assessed industrial buyers' opinions of restaurant meetings with sales represen- tatives 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 ex- amines 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 res- taurant meeting caused more favorable evaluations than a nonroutine, fancy restaurant meeting. T HE proper staging of buyer-seller meetings is an important aspect of personal selling. For exam- ple, a sales representative can influence the tone of a meeting simply by inviting an organizational buyer to a business lunch meeting, compared to having a meet- ing with the buyer in a busy office. Interestingly, there are reasons both for and against business lunch meet- ings in terms of what they accomplish (Dempsey, Bushman, and Plank 1980; Halvorson and Rudelius 1977), but the practical question about what sort of restaurant business meeting has the most favorable impact on organizational buyers has not been fully re- solved. This article examines the effects of two different meeting settings on industrial buyers' evaluations of three user-supplier purchase problems. In particular, the psychological effects of ordinary and nonroutine, "fancy" restaurant settings are considered. (By fancy we simply mean a restaurant environment that is es- Paul H. Schurr is Associate Professor, State University of New York at Albany. Bobby J. Calder is Professor of Behavioral Science in Manage- ment and Professor of Psychology, Northwestern University. This re- search was partially supported by the Business Foundation of North Carolina, Inc. The cooperation and support of the Purchasing Manage- ment Association of Chicago is gratefully acknowledged. Finally, the au- thors thank the anonymous JM reviewers for their helpful comments. sentially more elegant in terms of decor, service, and food than a more common or ordinary restaurant en- vironment.) Several issues are addressed: What ef- fects do different restaurant environments have on an organizational buyer's perceptions and judgment? Is such contextual influence limited to issue-specific problem evaluations, or are the buyer's overall eval- uations of the supplier influenced as well? Concep- tually, considering human information processing, how does a social context affect an industrial buyer's per- ception and judgment? First, background on the research problem is dis- cussed and research hypotheses developed. Theory underlying restaurant meeting "scripts" is summa- rized as the foundation for the research method, and then the method of study and results are reported. Lastly, the importance and implications of the find- ings are discussed, and areas for future research are suggested. A Marketing Perspective on Decision Context Effects The widely respected model of organizational buying behavior developed by Webster and Wind (1972) specifies that buying behavior is a function of indi- vidual characteristics, group factors, organizational Journal of Marketing Vol. 50 (January 1986), 87-97. Psychological Effects of Restaurant Meetings on Industrial Buyers I 87