The Research On Dimensions, Antecedents And Brand Loyalty Effect Of Customer Commitment

The service economy is one of the economy style coming after the agricultural economy and the industrial economy. Although overall development level of China service economy is relatively low, it develops most fast in the world at present, while the development of its service industry is so rapid which contributes 40 percent to the economic growth, showing a strong trend to keep pace with the industry. The development of service industry will be the key to the turning point of Chinese economic growth in.the future.On such an economy background, relationship marketing becomes a new research focus on which both scholars and enterprise have great interest in recent years, with the aim to establish, develop and maintain long-term and mutually beneficial relations between the deal sides. Brand loyalty plays important role in research on service relationship marketing while there are still some malfunctions on researching on brand loyalty based on the current customers satisfaction formula,it's obviously necessary to research brand loyalty from different angle.The research project is to research the brand relationship loyalty of the consumer from the perspective of the customer commitment. The concept of commitment has been researched broadly in the study of personal social relations (marriage, friendship, etc ), B2B business relationship (the lower and the upper of supply chains). Many studies have shown that commitment is the key to maintain and develop relations. Compared to that, it is still lack of systematic research about the role and the effect of customer commitment on the service relationship of B2C in marketing situation. Therefore, the dissertation gets the customer commitment scale by translating in two-way and context-transforming of the organization commitment scale which was developed by Allen & Meyer (1990).In most marketing situations, only two kinds of commitments, i.e. continuance commitment and affective commitment, are emphasized in the study of B2B business relations. However, in the B2C context, consumers, as the staff, have also been driven by three forces to maintain the relationship with a specific organization,.The three forces are: the economic strength (continuance commitment), the emotional strength (affective commitment), and the strength of value views (normative commitment). Consumption behavior of consumer is also driven by value views, so we'll analyses the commitment roundly from the three dimensions.The main conclusions are as follows:First of all, based on the two-way translation of the measurement scale of organizational commitment advanced by Allen & Meyer (1990), combined with the characteristics of the consumer psychological commitment to service enterprises, it converted the scale to the service marketing research context. In accordance with the scale pre-investigation and formal survey, it verified that it also applies to consumers of the three-dimensional classification in the organizational commitment of Allen & Meyer (1990). But in the marketing situation, there are significant differences between the effects of the various dimensions on the customer behavior tendency.Secondly, it analyzed the impact path of the three driving forces of customer commitments, i.e. service quality, customer trust and brand reputation. Customer brand trust has significantly direct positive impacts on the affective commitment and the continuance commitment, while service quality has a significantly direct positive impact on the continuance commitment. At the same time, brand reputation shows no significant direct impact on the affective commitment and the continuance commitment.On the other hand, it verified the customer's brand trust is a key driving factor. Brand reputation and service quality have direct impact on customers trust, and brand reputation has an indirect impact on customer commitment through customer brand trust.Thirdly, it attempted to analyses how the three dimensions of customer commitment impact on the consumer brand loyalty. It selected behavior loyalty, recommendation loyalty and prices loyalty as the research objects. Based on results of structure equation model, it found that affective commitment influences significantly on the three categories of customer loyalty. And normative commitment only has direct positive impact on the behavior loyalty and recommendation loyalty. While no impacts on price loyalty .Continuance commitment has the most complex impacts on brand loyalty—it has significant positive influence on behavior loyalty and price loyalty while significant negative impact on recommendation loyalty.It systematically analyzed the impacts of customer commitment on the brand loyalty. Through the analysis of the impact of customer commitment on the relation behavior tendency, it proved that customer commitment impacts strongly on service relation loyalty, which has a certain reference value for the the development of the service marketing theory.Finally, it can help enterprises develop appropriate marketing strategies to figure out the impacts from the three dimensions of customer commitment on consumer brand loyalty. Obviously, enterprises should dedicate to build affective commitment, which requires them have good interaction with customers, and make customers have so pleasant service experiences. The customer loyalty based on the affective commitment is the most solid. At the same time, enterprises can lock in customers by price promotion or credit programs. The continuance commitment builds upon the economic interests and related conversion restrictions. It may result in customers dissatisfaction and bring the enterprises negative reputation if it's used improperly. Therefore, based on empirical analysis of the coffee chain shops, it provides a reference and direction for enterprises marketing activities, especially the management activities of customer relationship.