Antecedents Of Customer Loyalty

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LITERATURE REVIEW: ANTECEDENTS OF CUSTOMER LOYALTY
From our studies we have identified main antecedents to customer loyalty along with some moderators vis-à-vis customer satisfaction, Commitment, Trust, Image, Conflict handling, Switching Cost. A brief review of these studies and explanation of these factors is presented below:
Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
“No matter what you sell, you’ve got to sell satisfaction. This approach helped us build a clientele that is second to none in customer loyalty.” Stanley Marcus There are several conceptual bases for the customer loyalty but customer satisfaction has widely been addressed in literature. Oliver (1980) defined satisfaction as a post choice evaluative judgment concerning …show more content…

Commitment differs from loyalty as commitment refers to economic, emotional and or psychological attachments which a customer has for a particular store or brand or service (Thomson et al., 2005) and then because of this commitment the customer decides to be loyal or disloyal with the brand. Commitment plays the role of stabilizing the behaviors or force that maintains the behavioral direction irrelevantly of the circumstances (Scholl, 1981). Consumer commitment is the psychological connection to a service to continue the relationship with his existing supplier. Commitment is an essential component of long-term relationship (Beatty et al., 1988, Morgan and Hunt, 1994). It is a useful construct for measuring the likelihood of customer loyalty (Gundlach et al., 1995). Commitment is one of the important, common as well as dependent variable employed in buyer seller relationship studies (Wilson, 1995). Indeed, commitment exceeds the framework of the favorable attitude towards the brand: commitment has a stronger strength, robustness and stability than the general attitude towards the brand. Affective commitment produces stronger link to loyalty (Fullerton, 2003). Customer commitment is described as a logical antecedent to loyalty (Evanschitzky et. al., 2006).Commitment strengthen the relationship between inertia and customer loyalty, only commitment provides resistance to attractiveness from alternative offerings and generates action loyalty ( Li-Wei Wu, 2011 ). By conducting empirical research various researchers have found that commitment positively influences loyalty and it is an essential part of successful long term relationships (Oliver, 1997, Morgan and Hunt, 1994; Gundlach et al., 1995; Garbarino and Johnson, 1999; Fullerton, 2003, Hansen et. al.,

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