A Study Of The Antecedents Of Customer Commitment And Its Relationship With Positive Word-of-Mouth Behavior

The percentage of services in GDP can be seen as an important indicator of the level of economic development of a country or region. Since the launch of the open-up and reform policy, China’s service sector has achieved rapid growth. However, compared with that of other countries, China’s service economy remains rather low in terms of overall level of development and global competitiveness. As such, study of service marketing strategies is of vital practical significance to the development of China’s service industries.Service marketing theory suggests that effective implementation of relationship marketing is essential to customer retention for service firms. And according to relationship marketing theory, customer commitment is the key to successful relationship marketing. Thus, a logical conclusion can be drawn that development of customer commitment is fundamental to customer retention for service firms. For another thing, service intangibility makes service evaluations hard before purchase. Consumers usually rely on word of mouth (WOM) to make purchase decisions. This means that service firms need to rely largely on positive WOM to attract new customers. The primary task of a business firm is customer creation, which includes customer retention and acquisition. Therefore, service firms need to understand how customer commitment occurs to develop effective customer retention strategies, and how positive WOM occurs to develop effective customer acquisition strategies.By constructing and testing a theoretical model of the antecedents of customer commitment and its relationship with positive WOM in the B2C service setting, the present study is intended to extend existing research on the antecedents and consequences of customer commitment and to provide practical guidance for service firms in developing effective customer creation strategies. Drawing on the findings of organizational commitment and existing customer commitment research, this study views customer commitment as consisting of calculative, affective, and normative dimensions, and investigates the antecedents of each dimension and the impact of each dimension on positive WOM behavior. Seeking evidence from Rational Choice Theory, Social Identity Theory, and Social Exchange Theory alongside an overall review of relevant theoretical and empirical studies, this study has extracted five major antecedent variables of customer commitment: economic value, economic switching costs, customer trust, customer identification, and preferential treatment. Also, the study examines the moderating effect of consumer’s level of education on the relationship between customer commitment and positive WOM.Using data from 516 samples drawn from several cities in Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta and resorting to structural equation modeling, the present study has arrived at the following conclusions:1. Major antecedents of continuance commitment are economic value and economic switching costs. Both economic value and economic switching costs are positively associated with continuance commitment, and they have the same degree of influence.2. Major antecedents of affective commitment are customer trust and identification. Both customer trust and customer identification positively affect affective commitment, but the latter exerts a greater influence than the former.3. A major antecedent of normative commitment is preferential treatment. Preferential treatment positively impacts on normative commitment.4. Continuance, affective, and normative commitments all positively affect positive WOM. Their degrees of influence move from normative commitment and affective commitment to continuance commitment on a down scale..5. Consumer’s level of education has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between each form of customer commitment and positive WOM.This study has made three major contributions:1. It has built a system of the antecedents of customer commitment on the basis of improvements on existing research deficiencies, providing a basis for future research. The present study has achieved these improvements: (a) It has reexamined the antecedents of“continuance commitment”based on a recognition of the voluntary nature of commitment; (b) Seeking evidence from Rational Choice Theory, Social Identity Theory, and Social Exchange Theory, it has investigated the key antecedents of customer commitment from a multidisciplinary perspective, improving the existing system of the antecedents of customer commitment.2. It has pioneered the attempt in China to explore the separate antecedents of each dimension of customer commitment in a fairly systematic manner based on a three-dimensional conceptualization, filling a research gap in China and adding to the global research findings in this field. Also, it is the first to investigate the impact of each of the customer commitment dimensions on positive WOM, extending the research both at home and abroad on how positive WOM occurs.3. It is the first to include consumer demographics in the model of the antecedents and consequences of customer commitment?specifically examining the moderating effect of consumer’s level of education, and has achieved findings different from previous research, providing new empirical evidence for the role that consumer demographics play between customer commitment and positive WOM.