The importance of developing and maintaining enduring relationships with customers of service businesses is generally accepted in the marketing literature. A key challenge for researchers is to identify and understand how managerially controlled antecedent variables influence important relationship marketing outcomes (e.g., customer loyalty and word-of-mouth communication). Relational benefits, which have a focus on the benefits consumers receive apart from the core service, and relationship quality, which focuses on the overall nature of the relationship, represent two approaches to understanding customer loyalty and word of mouth. This article integrates these two concepts by positioning customer satisfaction and commitment as relationship quality dimensions that partially mediate the relationship between three relational benefits (confidence benefits, social benefits, and special treatment benefits) and the two outcome variables. The results provide support for the model and indicate that the concepts ...

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Understanding Relationship Marketing Outcomes An Integration of Relational Benefits and Relationship Quality

This research, investigating retailer-consumer relationships, has three distinct intended contributions: (1) It shows that different relationship marketing tactics have a differential impact on consumer perceptions of a retailer’s relationship investment; (2) it demonstrates that perceived relationship investment affects relationship quality, ultimately leading to behavioral loyalty; and (3) it reveals that the effect of perceived relationship investment on relationship quality is contingent on a consumer’s product category involvement and proneness to engage in retail relationships. The authors empirically cross-validate the underlying conceptual model by studying six consumer samples in a three-country, transatlantic, comparative survey that investigates two industries.

Investments in Consumer Relationships: A Cross-Country and Cross-Industry Exploration

The four levels of loyalty and the pivotal role of trust: a study of online service dynamics

http://impgroup.org/uploads/papers/4744.pdf

Relationship quality as a predictor of B2B customer loyalty

With its conceptual roots in fields including psychology and organisational behaviour, the engagement concept is emerging in the marketing literature, with preliminary research indicating that engaged consumers might exhibit greater loyalty to focal brands. Despite these advancements, the engagement concept remains underexplored to date. This paper addresses this gap by reviewing literature in other disciplines and marketing, and developing a tripartite customer brand-engagement conceptualisation comprising activation, identification, and absorption dimensions. Further, a conceptual model illustrating the conceptually distinct nature of and relationships between customer brand engagement and other marketing constructs is proposed, followed by a customer engagement/loyalty-based segmentation analysis. Enhanced insights into customer engagement are expected to be valuable for marketing scholars and practitioners seeking to enhance customer relationships, retention, and loyalty. The paper thus concl...

Demystifying customer brand engagement: Exploring the loyalty nexus

Customer satisfaction with a company’s products or services is often seen as the key to a company’s success and long-term competitiveness. In the context of relationship marketing, customer satisfaction is often viewed as a central determinant of customer retention. However, the few empirical investigations in this area indicate that a direct relationship between these constructs is weak or even nonexistent. The overall purpose of this article is to develop a conceptual foundation for investigating the customer retention process, with the use of the concepts of customer satisfaction and relationship quality. The article involves a critical examination of the satisfaction ‐ retention relationship, and the development of a more comprehensive view of the customer’s quality perception. ©1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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The impact of customer satisfaction and relationship quality on customer retention: A critical reassessment and model development

Die dauerhafte Bindung von Kunden wird sowohl in der Marketingwissenschaft als auch der Unternehmenspraxis als wichtige Einflusgrose fur den okonomischen Erfolg von Unternehmen erkannt Das Forschungsfeld des Beziehungsmarketing hat in den vergangenen Jahren ein hohes Mas an Wissen zum Charakter von Geschaftsbeziehungen generiert Allerdings mangelt es bisher jedoch an Wissen uber die zentralen kundenbindungsgerichteten Steuerungsgrosen von Kundenbeziehungen


Das Relationship Quality-Modell stellt einen konzeptionellen Ansatz dar, diese Lucke zu schliesen Es integriert verschiedene Konstrukte (Kundenzufriedenheit, Qualitatswahrnehmung, Vertrauen, Commitment) und zeigt deren Beziehungen untereinander und zur Zielgrose Kundenbindung auf Die verschiedenen Elemente des Modells werden vorgestellt, in Hypothesengestalt uberfuhrt und empirisch uberpruft


Die Ergebnisse belegen die Aussagekraft des Relationship Quality-Modells fur das Beziehungsmarketing und bestatigen durchgangig die aufgestellten Hypothesen Hinsichtlich der Struktur des Konstruktes Beziehungsqualitat weisen die Ergebnisse allerdings auf die Notwendigkeit einer Modifikation der Konzeptualisierung hin

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Alexander Klee

Papers

The impact of customer satisfaction and relationship quality on customer retention: A critical reassessment and model development

Das Relationship Quality-Modell zur Erklärung von Kundenbindung: Einordnung und empirische Überprüfung