Does Satisfaction Affect Brand Loyalty

Abstract

ABSTRACTCustomer satisfaction and brand loyalty, a consequence of customer satisfaction, have been treated as marketing goals for most firms. Many researches consider loyalty as a multidimensional base. Despite finding of many researches that satisfaction has a positive impact on repurchase behavior, there are few researches which treat loyalty as actual repurchase Therefore, this study investigated loyalty as actual repurchase For this study, we divided loyal consumers into 4 groups, and conducted a longitudinal survey for two years. The results showed that customer satisfaction influenced repurchase intention and behavior differently according to each group.INTRODUCTIONDuring past three decades, customer satisfaction has been treated as a strategic goal for most companies(Mittal and Kamakura, 2001). Capraro, Broniarczyk, and Srivastava (2003) observe that today, most firm's programs to control customer defections center heavily on management of customer satisfaction.Most companies are running programs that can estimate customer satisfaction levels and provide more customer-oriented products and services. Because customer satisfaction is a post hoc evaluation of consumption experience, it has been regarded as a fundamental determinant of long-term consumer behavior (Oliver, 1980). These days researchers study outcome of customer satisfaction, but there have not been enough researches which deal with consumer complaints, negative WOM, and repurchase intention (Szymanski and Henard, 2001). Especially, studies on real link between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are still limited. There are, however, some researches that shows effects of customer satisfaction. It indicates that higher levels of customer satisfaction would lead to greater customer loyalty, which in turn has a positive impact on profitability (Reichhedl and Teal, 1996).There are a lot of environmental factors that are important to a firm's outcome (Bernhardt, Donthu and Kennett, 2000). Therefore, until recently, challenges have been from researchers to find a direct link between customer satisfaction and its outcomes.Loyalty is also an important strategic objective for all marketing managers. Oliver (1999) proposes that a shift in emphasis from satisfaction to loyalty appears to be a worthwhile change in strategy for most firms. Oliver (1997) defines loyalty as the deeply held commitment to rebuy or repatronize a preferred product/service consistently in future, thereby causing to purchase same-brand or same brand-set repetitively, despite situational influences and marketing efforts have potential to cause switching behavior. According to Oliver (1999), consumer loyalty can occur at four different levels: cognitive, affective, conative, and behavioral. Although all four views of consumer loyalty are meaningful, current research focuses on attitudinal and behavioral loyalty. Loyalty is a construct that has both attitudinal and behavioral elements when defined as the biased behavioral response expressed over time by some decision-making units with respect to one or more alternative brands out of a set of such brands, which is a function of psychological(decision making, evaluative) processes(Jacoby and Chestnut 1978,p80). Measuring loyalty by only one facet, that is, attitudinal or behavioral aspects, would result in a spurious attitude (an unstable attitude that does not influence consequent behaviors such as purchase) or spurious behavior (such as inertial behavior or impulsive behavior). Therefore, it is necessary to understand both attitudinal and behavioral loyalty.Theoretically, customer satisfaction should be linked to loyalty But there are some contradictions about their relationship. For example, Lemon, White, and Winer (2002) and Rust, Lemon, and Zeithaml (2004) maintain that many non-satisfaction elements that increase switching costs are important factors in whether satisfaction has a strong relationship to loyalty or not. …