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Keywords Customer loyalty, Relationship marketing, Corporate image, Service quality, Customer satisfaction
Abstract Relationship marketing requires a thorough understanding of the long-run perspective of the supplier-customer interaction. The concept of customer loyalty can be applied to emphasize the behavioural and attitudinal aspects of this interaction. This study investigates the antecedents of future customer loyalty in the commercial airline industry by applying structural models under four prototypical past loyalty conditions. These conditions are based on behavioural and situational descriptors and labelled in analogy to Day's compositional approach. It is shown that the superiority of relative attitudes claimed by Dick and Basu cannot be confirmed Corporate image of the service provider is, along with service quality and customer satisfaction, a powerful and illustrative component for explaining future customer loyalty. When comparing the a priori defined conditions (low, latent, spurious, and true loyalty) it turns out that the structural evaluative differences can be partially interpreted by the phenomena which are described as affective and calculative commitment in the literature. However, it is claimed to consider situational factors such as the character of the buying and decision-making process in much more detail
Introduction
Heading for customer satisfaction may often be "a matter of picking low-- hanging fruit" (Reichheld, 1996, p. 58). In order to avoid this satisfaction trap it is necessary, on the one hand, to track re-purchase behaviour at a longer period and, on the other hand, to concentrate on defecting customers. Customer loyalty seems to be the appropriate concept (Heskett et al., 1990) for strategic management planning. Yet, there are numerous ways of defining and measuring this matter. While academic research is continuously engaged in refining various conceptualizations for customer loyalty (e.g. Jacoby and Chestnut, 1978; Kahn et al., 1986; Rundle-Thiele et al., 1998; Samuelson and Sandvik, 1997) much less attention has been paid to the stronger integration of the loyalty concept into nomological relationships with other constructs of the marketing theory (Dick and Basu, 1994; Jacoby and Chestnut, 1978).
If we want to trace the loyal customer three conceptual perspectives are conceivable. First, there are behavioural concepts which strictly look at the repeat purchase behaviour that may be somehow biased (e.g. Cunningham, 1956; Tucker, 1964). Three main classes of measures evolved: proportion of purchase, sequence...