Relative attitudes and commitment in customer loyalty models: Some experiences in the commercial airline industry
International Journal of Service Industry Management
ISSN: 0956-4233
Article publication date: 1 August 2001
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.
Keywords
Citation
Zins, A.H. (2001), "Relative attitudes and commitment in customer loyalty models: Some experiences in the commercial airline industry", International Journal of Service Industry Management, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 269-294. https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000005521
Publisher
:MCB UP Ltd
Copyright © 2001, MCB UP Limited