Academic Research学术研究连载

走进中国工业品牌管理与竞争的新常态

Entering into the “IB and HB branding management Era”

                               by Dr. Yang XiaoTong

 Edited by Eric and authorized for release

OVERVIEW

In this part, we are going to have a discussion on the significance of customer loyalty to how well a certain company would perform on the market in multiple ways. Taking composite loyalty as a primary example within our study, we will do analysis why a reputable company is more likely to stay ahead of and more importantly, benefit from the current stiff market competitions across nearly all industries.               

2.5 Studies on Relationship between Customer Loyalty and Quality alongside Brand

As customer satisfaction theory argued, user’s loyalty is a function to user satisfaction and will have a concrete economic impact on an individual firm’s performance in the market (Gustafsson & Johnson, 2002). Apart from that, we have a lots more amount of research work also focusing on customer loyalty to consumer products and services (Brown, 1952; Cunningham, 1956; Dick & Basu, 1994; Farley, 1964; Fournier, 1998; Jacoby & K, 1973; Oliver et al., 1997; Andreassen & Lindestad, 1998; Fisher, 2001; Selnes, 1993; Zeithaml et al., 1996), all of which collectively discovered that customer loyalty is proven to be a significant contributor to a firm’s good business performance. Unfortunately, as opposed to B2C market, only a limited amount of work has ever gone the other way into similar research on customer loyalty in B2B market (Rauyruen & Miller, 2007).

In the context of B2B activities, Richard and Perrien (1999) discovered that relationship marketing has a direct impact on customer loyalty, which can be partly justified by what was discovered by Jarvis and Wilcox (1977), perceived risks which are involved in purchasing process and limited choice of reliable suppliers. At present, relevant research on customer loyalty has developed into three major types, which are behavioral loyalty (Tellis, 1988; Tucker, 1964), attitudinal loyalty (Bennett & Rundle-Thiele, 2002) and lastly composite loyalty (Day, 1969; Jacoby, 1971; Jacoby & Kyner, 1973; Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2001). What behavioral loyalty revolves around is history purchasing behavior, while attitudinal loyalty acts like manifesto made by loyal customers which can be reflected in repeated purchase data modeling. It has been verified by numerous scholars from many different angles that customer loyalty can benefit a given firm in many ways, such as oral spreading of good ratings, reviews or testimonials by loyal customers (Zeithaml et al., 1996; Andreassen & Lindestad, 1998). Apart from that, loyal customers are also willing to recommend or encourage others to buy or use what they are already familiar with (Zeithaml et al., 1996; Bettencourt & Brown, 1997). Composite loyalty is a more complex one that incorporates both behavioral loyalty and attitudinal loyalty, with backing from a variety of different literatures (Dick & Basu, 1994; Jacoby, 1971; Jacoby & Kyner, 1973; Jacoby & Chestnut, 1987; Rauyruen & Miller, 2007).

User loyalty means not only raised barrier to new market entrants but also reduced likelihood of existing users switching to other brands (Oliver, 1996). In business world, customer loyalty can be felt through the positive attitude an individual customer has towards a given brand, such as strong intention to make purchase and recommended or encouraged use to others (Zeithaml et al., 1996). It is fair to say that, brand is of a huge symbolic meaning to the quality of products it represents and is equally vital to create barrier to other potential market players in competition (Keller, 1993; Srivastava & Shocker, 1991). As we have previously mentioned with the literatures discussing the Commitment-Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing, trust brings increased customer satisfaction, which in return leads to enhanced customer commitment, consequently making customers staying more loyal. It was found by Schurr and Ozanne (1985) that trust is playing a big role in making negotiation between the supplier and the buyer a success with cooperation reached and disputes resolved, showing trust can make the partner stay more loyal like commitment does. In Keller’s point of view from his study of brand marketing theory (1993), the value which is created by band come down to the fact that brand is what makes consumers as well as retailers stay loyal, and what adds to their preference in choosing from multiple suppliers, and what makes competing brands’ marketing efforts in vain. Composite loyalty is a combined measurement of both customer’s intent for repeat purchase (behavioral loyalty) and customer’s attitude to a particular brand (attitudinal loyalty) (Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2001). Therefore, in this article with customer survey to be made, we will take composite loyalty as an example to examine how brand loyalty is measured from the customers’ perspective.

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For contact with the author, please email to shanshan@towermind.com;

For contact with the editor, please email to yangls@skiplifting.com