Customer Loyalty in Retail Sector

Thus, companies seek to strengthen customer loyalty. Brand loyalty is considered to tilt the consumer to purchase the package / product specific brand (Jacoby and Chestnut, 1978). Later, Oliver (1997) defined loyalty as "a deeply held commitment to REBUY or repatronize preferred product / service consistently in the future, thereby causing repetitive same-brand or same brand set purchasing, despite situational influences and marketing activities, which would result in causing switching behavior "(p. 34). This conceptual definition covers two different aspects of loyalty: the behavioral. This is consistent with an integrated conceptual framework proposed by Dick and Basu (1994), that customer loyalty is regarded as a "power relationship between the relative position of the individual and repeat

Developing a loyalty program is challenging. You team must understand what will keep your current customers interested and what will spark them to purchase multiple times.

Over the decades there were tremendous amount of challenges for every business. Customers have more knowledge, they have more options, and they have higher expectations. Customers are more informed with the humungous development in technology. Having more options in front of them, expectations has surpassed in retail industry. Loyalty is a customer having faith that your organization’s product or services offered is the best for them. It is the process of tapping the buying pattern of customers in a store based on their preferences. Customer loyalty is significant because it is economical to retain the old customers rather than acquiring new customers. So, organizations employ loyalty programs which reward customers for their repeat business.

From an organisations point of view, especially in the short term, it would seem more appropriate to concentrate on behavioural loyalty because this is reflected in sales behaviour. Such behaviour is easily measured compared to components of attitudinal loyalty and matches key managerial performance indicators. Attitudinal measures may also not reflect consumer’s actions when the consumer is confronted with real choice. However, from a longer term view and especially from a CRM viewpoint, it is also vitally important to measure attitudinal loyalty. Attitudinal loyalty is composed of commitment and trust in the brand and/or organisation which will have impacts on sales both in the short and longer term. This type of loyalty is more likely to be an indicator of the potential longer term relationships that will be possible with given customers. Attitudinal loyalty is also likely to have influence on word of mouth and customer advocacy which may lead to indirect impacts on longer term sales or on costs of servicing

Simplified brand loyalty describes a status in which consumers determine their selves in; out of it they become committed to a brand. Thereby they continue purchasing products or services of a specific brand. At this point consumers rather spent more money on a product of a specific brand than buying from multiple suppliers within the same category. Mainly brand loyalty is a result of consumer’s behavior, which is enforced through a company’s measurements regarding branding. Branding is a process that a company runs through in order to establish a new brand. The ambition here is to strengthen a unique name and image for a product in

According Baker M (2000), loyalty schemes is the “Overt attempt of exchanging partnership to build a long term relationship association, characterised by purposeful co-operation and mutual dependence on the development of social, as well as structural bonds with consumer”.

While I’m an atypical U.S. consumer who doesn’t buy into marketing hype, I do have strong product/service loyalty affiliations. I’ll try to keep my Journal entry under 1000 words! I like to revisit the meaning of familiar words. Merriam-Webster (n.d.) defines loyalty as, “The quality or state or an instance of being loyal”. This is exactly what brand loyalty and loyalty programs are trying to create: an ongoing experience with multiple touch-points that captures followers and keeps them engaged through rewards, added value, and “prestige”. The goal is to lengthen “the lifetime value of the customer” (Tanner & Raymond, 2010, p. 284) which helps to maximize profits.

U.S. consumers hold 3.3 billion memberships in customer loyalty programs, the 2015 COLLOQUY Loyalty Census shows, a 26% increase over the number of memberships reported in COLLOQUY’s last census study in 2013 (Colloquy, 2015) With loyalty programs established this helps to generate a repeat customers which drives profits and promises future revenue. Consumers need an incentive to purchase a product at a certain place. When Loyalty programs are in place it helps the consumer relate to the product and funnels them towards the product in which they feel that they are apart of. They can build exclusive points and incentives when products are purchased and are then able to use those rewards points at a later time to purchase more goods or even get a portion of the cash back.

Loyal customers are excessively important to any business, and businesses spend great amount of their time, energy and money analyzing and captivate those customers. However, the usual definition of a loyal customer that we consider is a high spending customer, and that definition is imperfect. Marketing to customers — based on true loyalty — requires more: complicated measurement, better spend data, and considering that a regular customer is not the same as a loyal customer.

Throughout the years customer loyalty has grown to be one of the central goals of modern businesses. The longer you bind customers to your business, the less costly these customers become to serve. Over the years these customers become loyal and at some point they even become business builders. They are willing to pay premium prices, they spend more and they bring in new customers. Loyalty programs (discounts, gifts and such) are meant to act as a gate to improve the match between customers and their preferences and thus should benefit the customer. Others, however, claim that loyalty only chains consumers by making them more dependent on producers. Producers have great interest in more information on this topic so they can use this for their own marketing strategies.

oyalty programs are offered by both retailers and manufacturers to stimulate continued patronage among consumers through discounts, cash, free goods, or special services (such as free magazines on specialized topics of interest to loyalty program members). While retail cooperatives pioneered loyalty programs through giving members allowances based on their annual purchases, the more modern use of loyalty programs began with Raleigh cigarette coupons and with stamp-based programs such as the S&H Green Stamp Company (which offered consumers points based on purchases; these points were redeemable for a broad selection of merchandise). The most current form of customer loyalty

Customer will regularly buy from a repertoire of goods and services within a given field. Therefore customer loyalty programmes may engender behavioural loyalty but they may not guarantee attitudinal loyalty when a competitive brand develops its own loyalty schemes or the customers cashes in his or her rewards (Cook, 1997). Wal-Mart emphasizes that keep a good relationship

In spite of the great practical approach the impact and evaluation of loyalty card are very limited in terms of academic interest because the effectiveness of loyalty program has questionable from the customer behavior point of view. We refer some studies to evaluate the impact of loyalty card in business.

The term “Brand Loyalty” also called as “Customer Loyalty” has been in the business industry since a very long time as a model to be used in conducting business. But it wasn’t until the mid to late 1900’s that the term was actually given its due importance by making it a vital part of advertising and marketing. The concept of marketing evolved substantially from being focused on sales of a product to having Customer satisfaction to be its focal point. Studies further revealed that there was a positive correlation between customer satisfaction and Brand Loyalty.

Loyalty programs (either ‘on the shop delivery ' or ‘web based ') can be classified either based on types of rewards and recognition tools used or the mechanism by which customers earn their rewards.