The Satisfaction of Change

Customer loyalty has long time been a topic which has drawn much attention within the academic management literature (Chandrashekaran, Rotte, Tax, & Grewal, 2007; Palmatier, Scheer, & Steenkamp, 2007; Yim, Tse, & Chan, 2008; Del Giudice, & Polski, 2003; Del Giudice & del Giudice, 2003; Del Giudice, & Maggioni, 2014). Heightened competitive dynamics in contexts characterized by high business intensity and oversupply (Bang & Joshi, 2010; Brondoni, 1983, 2002a, 2002b; Busacca, 1991; Schindehutte, Morris, & Kocak, 2008; Sirmon, Hitt, Arregle, & Campbell, 2010;), the evolution of types of competition (Adler, 2010; Ballestra, Del Giudice & Della Peruta, 2014), the progressive saturation of many markets (Li & Atuahene-Gima, 2001; Taherparvar, Esmaeilpour, & Dostar, 2014; Belkahla & Triki, 2011).,; and the structural modifications of the exchange processes induced by the emergence of the digital economy (Gnyawali, Fan, & Penner, 2010; Wind & Mahajan, 2001) have sustained the progressive importance of the topic in recent years, leading to a growing interest of scholars primarily for the interconnections between offer and demand, as a direct consequence of the increasing technological, competitive, and relational complexity that permeates the markets (Brondoni, 2002a, 2002b; Carayannis, 1998, 1999, 2008, 2009, 2013; Carayannis & Alexander, 1999, 2002; Carayannis & Campbell, 2009, 2011; Chung, Jin, & Sternquist, 2007;). Moreover, understanding that the “customer theory” and the behavioral patterns of demand had not given adequate insight into the phenomena resulting from purchase decisions and the evaluation of repurchase options was previously pointed out by several researchers (Berger, Möslein, Piller, & Reichwald, 2005; Day & Wensley, 1983; Grönroos, 1994a, 1994b;). However, only more recently, the study of demand behavior has shown that the extension of research to product–customer interaction subsequent to a purchase is to be considered fundamental to generate new knowledge on a core construct such as customer loyalty (Ball, Coelho, & Machás, 2004; Gijsbrechts, Heerde, & Pauwels, 2008; Tse, Nicosia, & Wilton, 1991; Van Heerde & Bijmolt, 2005;).

Nowadays, the set of business resources identifies in customer loyalty one of the most important intangible assets(Christopher, Payne & Ballantyne, 1992; Cialdini, 1984; Clemmer & Schneider, 1996;Cronin & Taylor, 1992; Crosby & Taylor, 1983; Cummings & Bromiley, 1996): as pointed out on several occasions by the management literature, loyalty is a core resource both for businesses and for customers (Darroch, 2005; Palacios Marqués & José Garrigós Simón, 2006; Smith & Rupp, 2002; Rowley, 2002; Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2001; Hollensen, 2015; Palmatier, Jarvis, Bechkoff, & Kardes, 2009). The deep changes experienced by modern markets have progressively led businesses toward the need for a more rational analysis of their customer portfolio and turnover dynamics (Bang & Joshi, 2010; Schindehutte, Morris, & Kocak, 2008; Sirmon, Hitt, Arregle, & Campbell, 2010), concluding that the conquest of new customers can be compatible, in purely economic terms, only with high-growth markets and customers who tend to express a low churn rate (Selden & MacMillan, 2006; Tsai, 2005; Verhees, Meulenberg, & Pennings, 2010; Vrontis & Thrassou, 2007). However, the digital economy and the new evolutionary trends of markets and consumers have created a fracture with respect to the way customer loyalty was interpreted before the introduction of the Internet. Today, the acquisition of a new customer is much more expensive than the interventions that may be implemented for retention purposes (Reichheld, 1996; Kotler, Burton, Deans, Brown & Armstrong, 2015); moreover, for this reason indeed, on the Internet, the strategic attitude of a company aims at favoring the preservation of the “capital” that is mostly at risk: loyal customers (Busacca & Castaldo, 1996,Saeidi, Sofian, Saeidi, Saeidi & Saaeidi, 2015.). The warning signs of such a revolution in the concept of business, and the conditions triggering such a change in the markets, first classical (offline) and then digital (online), are numerous and varied (Shankar, Smith, & Rangaswamy, 2003; Zhang & He, 2012):

At the dawn of e-commerce, there was a common feeling that it was senseless to talk about loyalty: it was believed that with the Internet, the ease of switching from one shop to another, and the opportunity to explore purchase alternatives in a very short time worldwide, would have discouraged any attempt by businesses to implement an e-loyalty strategy (Chen & Hitt, 2000; Jones, Motherbaugh & Beatty, 2000; Xu, Goedegebuure, & van der Heijden, 2006). Such a belief, however, was challenged by empirical evidence that Internet users visit their virtual stores much more often than any other traditional store (Inman, Winer, & Ferraro, 2009; Kaltcheva & Weitz, 2006; Adam, Dogramaci, Gangopadhyay & Yesha, 1999; Agrawal, Arjona & Lemmens, 2001; Allen, Kania & Yaeckel, 1998; Amit & Zott, 2001; Anderson, 2002; Bakos, 1997; Cameron, 1999; Brynjolfsson & Smith, 2000; Zwass, 1998 ). Moreover, the real explosion of e-commerce during the early years of the new economy led Internet companies to not deal at first with customer loyalty. Today, the situation of online markets is quite different: strong competition on the Web has encouraged businesses to take on a more critical and rational analysis of Internet marketing strategies, coming to the conclusion that in order to make a profit, traffic generation is not sufficient. Unlike the early diffusion of Internet technology, the success of a website does not depend on the number of visits but essentially on the frequency of use and its ability to “retain” customers, minimizing the churn rate (Shankar, Smith, & Rangaswamy, 2003; Zhang & He, 2012). The model developed in this study focuses, as anticipated, on business-to-business (B2B) online customer experience, empirically testing the resistance to change of a typically unloyal business customer, consistently with the possession of a shopping script induced by the supplier. Instrumental to this model is the definition of online loyalty (e-loyalty); as in offline markets, loyalty has a dual nature, behavioral and cognitive, this is also true in the case of e-loyalty (online loyalty), the two dimensions of which are kept strictly separate: e-retention and e-fidelity. The former concerns the inertial forms of loyalty, that is, repeated purchasing behavior somehow forced and not accompanied by an adequate satisfaction and emotional involvement. Thus, e-retention indicates the pure and simple behavioral aspect of loyalty that, only if combined with adequate mental fidelity (e-fidelity), turns into e-loyalty. The inertial forms of loyalty are represented by all those cases in which a customer is forced to stay on a certain website because of:

The literature recognition carried out in the second chapter has allowed the identification of the major dimensions underlying the developed model. As highlighted, the objective of this study is the empirical verification of customer behavior in a business-to-business (B2B) market. B2B has particular structural connotations: first of all, with regard to the demographic features of customers (professionals in the industry compared with end users), their buying capacity (in bulk rather than at the retail level), their bargaining power (directly linked to a better ability to trade on the types of purchases made in relation to variables such as “time continuity” and “volume of purchases”), and the determinants of their loyalty (B2B operators compared with B2B customers tend to be more rational when purchasing. The balance is often given by variables such as price, speed of the purchasing process, product availability, and the elements of customer service. Therefore, as B2B operators are more informed and rational when purchasing, they are potentially more disloyal.) Thus, the literature shows that in a digital economy, and in particular in the B2B sector, the need to induce the creation of a client shopping script is vital for companies that aspire to maximize the spontaneous resistance to change of their customers. The presence of a shopping script provides the individual with a sense of order, organization, and structuring of stimuli from the environment, simplifying the management of cognitive activity (Benjafield, 1992). These benefits inherent in the script would justify a substantial reluctance by individuals to change the buying patterns in use. Moreover, the tendency of consumers in B2B markets to maintain their purchasing patterns, thus speeding up the buying process (which is a critical factor for a company or, more generally, a professional) and not reviewing the assumptions of the established pattern, is precisely the cognitive manifestation of spontaneous resistance to change the acquired patterns (Johnson, 1994).

The issue addressed in this study is part of the debate on customer retention tools available to online businesses operating in business-to-business (B2B) markets and on the ability of the latter to induce in customers the creation of established purchase paths (shopping scripts) capable of increasing their loyalty through a greater and voluntary resistance to change. The limited presence of empirical analyses in the B2B sector is the strong point and the main innovation of this study. Following the analysis of the different contributions that make up the theoretical framework of the research, it was proposed to investigate the relationship between knowledge of the shopping script of online goods or services by customers and the perceived cost of switching to a potential new supplier.