Understanding Services Loyalty: an Empirical Exploration of Theoretical Structure in Two Service Markets

There has been a great deal of debate over the past 70 years about the construct of loyalty and how it is best measured. There has been no consistency. This has led to an untenable situation where marketers are disillusioned with loyalty and as a result they are shifting away from measuring and tracking loyalty. An important rationale for this work is to improve our understanding of loyalty by identifying what loyalty is and what it is not. A more insightful view of loyalty can help marketers to develop and reinforce marketing programs to increase loyalty and hence profits, based on the types of loyalty that are actually exhibited by their consumers. To improve our understanding of loyalty seven dimensions of loyalty namely preferential purchase, allegiance, attitudinal loyalty, propensity to be loyal, situational loyalty, resistance to competing offers, and complaining behaviour were tested. Three behavioural dimensions, namely citizenship behaviour, resistance to competing offers and preferential purchase in addition to the attitudinal dimension of loyalty can be considered as measures of loyalty.