دانلود رایگان مقاله تاثیر قالب فروشگاه خرده فروشی بر ارتباط وفاداری رضایتمندی

abstract

Maintaining and improving customer loyalty is an important strategic goal for businesses as competition has intensified in almost all sectors of the economy. Retailers, in particular, feel the need to invest in customer loyalty more than ever before as channels and store format alternatives available for consumers to shop at have proliferated. However, current research in marketing provides little guidance to retail managers about developing and sustaining shopper loyalty across different store formats. Toward filling this gap, the present research examines the shopper satisfaction-loyalty link in two different store formats (supermarkets and hypermarkets). Using data from surveys of 505 Spanish shoppers at both types of retail formats, we examined how shoppers' attitudinal and behavioral loyalty develop differently. Our results reveal important differences and offer directions for the pursuit of different strategies by supermarkets and hypermarkets. The specific strategies, and the implications of this research for theory and practice are discussed.

4. Discussion

The link between satisfaction and loyalty has always been of interest to both academics and marketers. However, the research into the mechanism through which satisfaction impacts loyalty has not yielded consistent findings. Although, in general, satisfaction is shown to positively affect loyalty, the strength of the relationship varies across different empirical studies. These inconsistencies have left managers and retailers without a solid understanding of how suggested antecedents impact desired outcomes of attitudinal and behavioral loyalty that would in turn affect profitability. Following Kumar et al. (2013), we believe that this is due to incomplete frameworks and ambiguity in defining loyalty. In particular, attitudinal and behavioral loyalty should be separated. In the current research, we distinguished between the two types of loyalty and propose a model which allows for both direct and indirect paths from satisfaction to the two types of loyalty. We include trust as a mediator, since previous research and theory overwhelmingly agrees that it is an important construct in the satisfaction-loyalty frameworks. We derived hypotheses from the previous literature where we found a reasonable consensus on the relationships between the constructs of our study. We also hypothesized that store format moderates the relationships between the main constructs. Our model appears to be unprecedented in the literature and, we believe that itself is a contribution of our paper to the marketing literature. Our main contribution, however, is that we have interesting and somewhat counterintuitive results from our empirical examination. We tested our model using structural equation modeling on a dataset from a large survey of Spanish supermarket and hypermarket shoppers. Our results suggest that attitudinal loyalty is a necessary antecedent of behavioral loyalty. Therefore, we suggest that spurious loyalty, behavioral loyalty without attitudinal loyalty, is very hard to achieve particularly in the context of grocery retailing. Upon further investigation, we find that while trust partially mediates the path between satisfaction and attitudinal loyalty in our pooled sample and supermarket subsample, it does not have a mediating effect in the hypermarket subsample. This was particularly interesting as it suggests that the mediating role of trust is contingent on the context. The follow-up test of the moderating role of store format provided additional support for the difference we observed after comparing the results of subsamples. Store format was found to have significant moderating role on two links: satisfaction to attitudinal loyalty and trust to attitudinal loyalty. The moderating effect is such that it significantly increases the magnitude of the effect of satisfaction on attitudinal loyalty in hypermarket (compared to supermarket) while significantly reduces the impact of trust on attitudinal loyalty such that the link becomes insignificant. This finding suggests important differences in loyalty building mechanism between supermarkets and hypermarkets. Whereas satisfaction is found to be solely responsible for increasing attitudinal loyalty and subsequently behavioral loyalty in hypermarkets, trust is shown to play key mediating role in supermarkets. As a result, different strategies are suggested for supermarkets and hypermarkets that strive for building and maintaining customer loyalty. As we expected, the differences that exist between the two store formats, and how those differences in turn affect utility, play an important role in determining the suitable strategy for retailers in each case.