Customer demotion in hierarchical loyalty programmes

Hierarchical loyalty programmes are popular in many service industries, as a means to tie customers to the company and improve customer relationships. In these programmes, customers obtain more benefits if they spent more but are demoted if they spent less. This study focuses on demotion and suggests that customer demotion can have an asymmetrical negative effect on customers' trust, commitment, and loyalty. The effect appears strongest for demoted customers with an external locus of causality. An experimental study also shows that customer loyalty is lower for demoted customers than for customers who were never elevated.     

Convenience,Price, Product

Abstract

This study examines the factors motivating consumers' purchases of specialty food and beverage products via the Internet. While convenience is often cited as a motivating factor, price and product selection have also been identified. This study considered convenience in terms of time, space, and effort. It also identifies several specific sub-categories for price and products. Among respondents who had made a recent online purchase, convenience-related issues were most frequently cited as being relevant to the purchase decision. Product-related factors were important for nearly one-third of the respondents. Price was of relatively little importance.     

Customer Involvement in Product Development: An Industrial Network Perspective

Purpose: In business markets, working with customers and users has become increasingly important to get knowledge about customer needs and to develop new products. The purpose of this article is twofold: (1) to develop a framework for analyzing customer involvement in product development in a business market context, and (2) to apply this framework to a particular company to describe and analyze how it practices customer involvement.

Methodology/approach: The article takes its main theoretical starting point in the industrial network approach, but also uses other literature from the innovation and product development field. The empirical study applies a qualitative case study approach and focuses on one company in the truck business.

Findings: The suggested framework deals with four key aspects of customer involvement: Why, when, how, and who. The observed pattern of the truck manufacturer shows how dealers, hauliers, and truck drivers are all part of the overall understanding of the customer. These actors are involved for different, typically very clear, purposes at different points in time through surveys, product clinics, and field testing. The pattern, referred to as mixed facilitative, is not one of close collaboration with individual customers, but one of broad involvement of several customers through business intelligence and direct involvement.

Research implications: First, the article provides researchers with a framework and method for studying customer involvement in product development. Second, the case study provides an illustrative example of the customer involvement pattern pursued by a leading company in a major industry. This enhances the understanding of the focal phenomenon, leads to managerial implications, and gives ideas for future research.

Practical implications: There are several managerial implications related to the why, when, how, and who questions. For example, it is pointed out that managers should consider involving customers more extensively than what seems to be common today—for example, by using customers as codevelopers, working with them throughout the entire development process (i.e., not only early and late), and including different types of users (with different requirements and wishes).

Originality/value/contribution of the article: The contribution lies in the development of a framework centered on the four key questions of customer involvement in

product development and using this framework for observing a pattern, and finding explanations and relating this pattern to how other firms are doing.     

众包模式下顾客参与、顾客互动和新产品价值

将众包模式下顾客参与划分为合作众包模式下顾客参与和竞争众包模式下顾客参与两个关键维度,确定顾客互动之人际互动、人机互动的重要维度构成,构建众包模式下顾客参与直接影响新产品价值,以及通过顾客互动的中介效应间接影响新产品价值的理论模型。实证检验结果表明：合作众包模式下顾客参与、竞争众包模式下顾客参与对新产品价值的积极影响都显著;人际互动在合作众包模式下顾客参与影响新产品价值的关系中起完全中介效应,但在竞争众包模式下顾客参与影响新产品价值的关系中无中介效应;人机互动在竞争众包模式下顾客参与影响新产品价值关系中的部分中介效应显著,但在合作众包模式下顾客参与影响新产品价值关系中的中介效应不显著。     

Customer perceived value,satisfaction, and loyalty: The role of switching costs

It is a marketplace reality that marketing managers sometimes inflict switching costs on their customers, to inhibit them from defecting to new suppliers. In a competitive setting, such as the Internet market, where competition may be only one click away, has the potential of switching costs as an exit barrier and a binding ingredient of customer loyalty become altered? To address that issue, this article examines the moderating effects of switching costs on customer loyalty through both satisfaction and perceived‐value measures. The results, evoked from a Web‐based survey of online service users, indicate that companies that strive for customer loyalty should focus primarily on satisfaction and perceived value. The moderating effects of switching costs on the association of customer loyalty and customer satisfaction and perceived value are significant only when the level of customer satisfaction or perceived value is above average. In light of the major findings, the article sets forth strategic implications for customer loyalty in the setting of electronic commerce. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Price discrimination through multi-level loyalty programs

Loyalty programs often feature multiple rewards with different requirements; for instance, an airline offering a free domestic ticket for 10 K miles, and an international ticket for 20 K miles. This research focuses on the role of multi-level rewards as a segmentation and price discrimination mechanism: Multi-level rewards can increase firm profits when buyers differ in purchase frequency and/or time discount factor. We propose that a program with two rewards can be designed in such a way that (i) it is more profitable than a one-reward program, and (ii) buyers self-select. Light users prefer to receive the smaller reward two times over receiving the larger reward one time, even though the smaller reward is less than half of the larger reward. We show that the smaller reward helps the firm enlarge its base in the light user segment. We also compare multi-level programs with quantity discounts.     

Customer perceived value,satisfaction, and loyalty: the role of willingness to share information

This study proposes and tests an integrative model to examine the relationships among customers’ willingness to share information, satisfaction, perceived value, and loyalty in a retailing context. This study extends research on customers’ willingness to share information from trust and privacy concerns toward key outcome measures such as perceived value, customer satisfaction, and loyalty, and is thus among the first to model customers’ willingness to share information with companies in robust theoretical retailing frameworks. The proposed relationships were tested using data from two retailing contexts – groceries (N = 429) and do-it-yourself (DIY) (N = 895). Findings from the two samples suggest that both perceived value and satisfaction are significant determinants of customers’ willingness to share information with a company. Although some differences emerge in the two studies, structural modeling largely supports the hypothesized framework and positions customers’ willingness to share information as an important antecedent of their loyalty intentions and behavior. This study provides practitioners with preliminary insight into the relationship between willingness to share information and perceived value, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. This study advances retailing research, as it is one of the few empirical studies investigating the role of customers’ willingness to share information in driving loyalty and its relationship with perceived value and satisfaction in a retailing context.     

Website Interaction Network

The websites-based social network, as a social media, provides and shares abundant information via organizing users’ content and contacts, whereby users’ activities in the real world can be imaged to the websites. However, users’ content and contacts in real-world social networks cannot be detected easily. Herein, we construct a website interaction network to reflect the online social network, based on mapping relationships among websites, webpages, and attributes of a social event. This network reflects the social association relationships between websites of an event, which can be mapped to the users’ relationships in the real-world social network. In this article, we study the structural features of a website interaction network and, then, mapping of these features to the real-world social network. Further, we discuss implications for human behaviors, human relationships, and structure of human society. Experimental results show that the website interaction networks concerning popular social events have power-law scaling in degree distribution and exhibit small-world properties.     

Customer retailer loyalty in the context of multiple channel strategies

With an increasingly competitive retail environment and decreasing customer switching costs, customer retailer loyalty is a critical goal for merchants of all types. We investigate customer retailer loyalty in the context of multiple channel retailing strategies. Results show that multiple channel retail strategies enhance the portfolio of service outputs provided to the customer, thus enhancing customer satisfaction and ultimately customer retailer loyalty. These results suggest that multiple channel retailing can be a useful strategy for building customer retailer loyalty.     

Price fairness perceptions and customer loyalty in a retail context

Loyalty and fairness are major research topics in the marketing literature. However, research examining how customer loyalty and fairness perceptions affect each other is lacking. This study examines these two topics in the context of a retailer increasing its prices, develops hypotheses, and tests these hypotheses using an experimental design approach. Results indicate that loyalty has a positive effect on fairness perceptions when price increases are low, though no such effect is found when price increases are high. Also, justifiable reasons for price increases lead to increased fairness perceptions when price increases are low, but any reason offered when price increases are high increases fairness perceptions. Whether distributive or procedural fairness influences post customer loyalty in the presence of price increases is dependent on both the level of the price increase and the reason offered for the price increase. This research provides implications for retailers and directions for future research.     

Customer loyalty in e-commerce: an exploration of its antecedents and consequences

This paper investigates the antecedents and consequences of customer loyalty in an online business-to-consumer (B2C) context. We identify eight factors (the 8Cs—customization, contact interactivity, care, community, convenience, cultivation, choice, and character) that potentially impact e-loyalty and develop scales to measure these factors. Data collected from 1,211 online customers demonstrate that all these factors, except convenience, impact e-loyalty. The data also reveal that e-loyalty has an impact on two customer-related outcomes: word-of- mouth promotion and willingness to pay more.     

客户关系管理在同程网的实施应用及优化研究

客户关系管理具有理念性强、注重实际操作和运营、方法性和技术性强等特点。同程网是目前国内一流的旅游电子商务平台之一,也是我国唯一拥有B2B旅游企业间平台和B2C大众旅游平台的电子商务网站。针对同程网在客户关系管理中出现的网络营销互动平台需要进一步发展、操作流程过于繁杂、一线员工流动性较高,以及品牌效应不强等问题,同程网应采取开发联接景点与游客的互动平台,优化企业内部的操作流程,灵活设计一线员工管理制度和方法,提高品牌效应等优化措施,以促进企业更好地发展。     

Customer loyalty through social networks: Lessons from Zara on Facebook

Companies’ escalating investment in social media—in particular, in Facebook—has become reality. However, most firms still do not see social networks as a vehicle for cultivating and winning customer loyalty, but rather as a resource for creating brand awareness. In this article, we offer a different view. By examining fans and non-fans of the Zara brand on Facebook, we discovered that Facebook enhances the relations that increase loyalty via trust, customer satisfaction, perceived value, and commitment. Our results revealed that these relations are stronger for fans of the brand than for non-fans, and suggest that customer satisfaction is the strongest determinant of loyalty. This indicates a new opportunity for marketing managers to achieve customer loyalty: Facebook.     

Dimensions of Customer Value of Website Communication in Business-to-Business Relationships

The study aims at eliciting dimensions of customer value (CV) of website communication in business-to-business relationships. It draws upon the literature on CV and the interaction approach, utilizing a qualitative case study in the elevator industry. The study portrays seven dimensions of CV of website communication in business-to-business relationships: convenience, efficiency, competence, confidence, comfort, appreciation and enjoyment.     

New Evidence on Price and Product Quality

A variety of investigations have indicated that consumers subjectively perceive a positive relation between price and product quality. However it is also necessary to consider the objective analysis of actual price-quality relations which exist among competing products available for consumer choice. This investigation reviews findings from some subjective and objective evaluations of the price-quality relationship, followed by an objective analysis of price versus quality among 135 recently marketed groups of products in five product categories. Findings indicate that for 51 percent of the products a positive price-produce quality relation may be inferred, and dramatic differences in this relation are evident from one product category to another. Implications of these findings for the efficiency of consumer decision-making, the performance of consumer markets and future research on objective price-quality relations are discussed.     

Consideration, choice, and classifying loyalty

Presented is an approach to classify a brand’s buyers into groups with varying degrees of loyalty along a continuum from “hard-core loyal” to “hard-core switcher.” A taxonomy is developed based on the joint use of stated consideration set and brand-switching data. In an empirical application to the automobile industry, classic stochastic models such as Grover-Srinivasan (J Mark Res 24:139–153, 1987) and Colombo-Morrison (Mark Sci 8(1):89–99, 1989), which attempt to recover the heterogeneity existing in the switching matrix overstate the number of hard-core loyals (buyers who repurchase with probability one) by 48% and 67%, respectively. The proposed taxonomy illuminates the sources of the overestimation and provides insights into the brand health of competing automotive makes.

信息商品价格决定模型

信息商品价格的合理确定 ,体现了信息商品供求双方的利益 ,不仅能够促进信息商品贸易的发展 ,而且对新技术的开发和迅速推广应用具有积极的作用。在对信息商品买方预期新增利润估算的基础上 ,利用效用理论和经济博弈理论 ,建立信息商品的价格决定模型