Commercial friendship in Dutch cafés

How do bartenders become friends with their guests?

A typical Dutch café has a bar where guests sit and interact with the bartender. As guests visit the venue more often and have pleasurable interactions with hosts, close relationships start to emerge.

These relationships are highly desirable because, through the added value, they are known to elicit loyal behavior. Yet how does one foster such commercial friendships?

In this PhD project, we aim to understand how relationships between guests and bartenders start, develop, and turn into commercial friendships. These friendships form in a commercial setting and eventually become equal to normal friendships. We are looking for the sparks that trigger the processes that make relationships go from one phase into the next, growing from casual to very close.

What is already known is that when people experience pleasurable interactions, they disclose more about themselves which leads to feelings of closeness, which in turn leads to more disclosure. This perpetual process of sharing and feeling close is very delicate. Someone can be too blunt by disclosing too much or can be sharing too less and seem detached. In both cases, people will experience negative emotions, which results in a declining friendship.

We will look for the right amount of disclosure related to a certain level of perceived closeness to accelerate friendship development. We will do so by doing several studies to measure the growth of friendship over time and investigate the emotional outcomes of self-disclosure.

People that want to build close friendships can use the knowledge we will gain in this project, not just in a commercial setting to create a competitive advantage, but in all adult friendships to enhance their general well-being.

Project Partners

NHL Stenden university of applied sciences