Chinese Religiosity And Its Impact On Customer Loyalty

Religisity is the extent to apply one's religious belief into his/her life by individual,showing to what extent the individual believes in his/her religion.M ore attention has been paid on the development of religious industry and its influences by the whole society.Meanwhile,each religion can impact the followers' thoughts,behavior and attitude directly and indirectly through the religious doctrine.Then the believers apply these impacts into their peosonal life and consuming psychology and consuming behavior.Thus a new question can be proposed from these important influences: Does a consumer's religiosity impact his/her customer loyalty? And how does the religiosity influnce customer loyalty?Although previous research found the positive relation between religiosity and customer satisfaction,and the negative relation between religiosity and brand switching,the relation between religiosity and customer loyalty has not been explained yet.Besides,there are significant differences between Chinese religiosity and foreigners' religiosity.Chinese religiosity,that to what extent a Chinese resident to accept and apply supernatural elements in his/her life,are effected by both traditional and modern Chinese culture.However,there are few researches investigated the influence of Chinese religiosity on daily consuming behavior.Therefore,this study was trying to explore Chinese religiosity and its relationship with customer loyalty and to reveal the features of Chinese religiosity.Based on the theory of religiosity and customer loyalty in the Chinese context,the core concepts in this study were defined including religiosity,spirituality,innovativeness and religious motivation.According to the literarure review about the influnces of religion and religiosity on consumer psycholoy an d consumer behavior,this study presented several hypotheses after theoretical deduction for the first time in the academic field,describing the positive impact of religiosity on customer loyalty,the mediating efforts of spirituality and innovativeness,the moderating effort of religious motivation.And a new theoretical relation model of religiosity and customer loyalty was established up.According to the nature of Chinese consumers' religiosity,classic measurement tooles and interview material,a new measurement tool was developed which could be applied to any consumer with or without religious belief.This tool makes it possible for other researchers to explore the effort and influence of religiosity in various academic fields and promotes a great progress for the development of Chinese religious psychology.A series of emprical tests were conducted in monopoly products industry,fast moving consumer goods industry,durable consumer goods industry,optional durable goods industry and special consumer goods industry on the relation model of religiosity an customer loyalty,with questionaire survey,random sampling,repeated sampling,cluster ananlysis,variance analysis,structural equation model and regression analysis.The results of empirical tests showed that,(1)there was a positive relation between religiosity and customer loyalty in each of the five industries,(2)religiosity could enhance customer loyalty through promoting spirituality,(3)religiosity would intensify customer loyalty by restraining innovativeness,(4)religious motivation moderated the relation between religiosity and cutomer loyalty.Internal religious motivation enhanced the positive influences of religiosity and spirituality on customer loyalty and enhanced the negative impact of religiosity and innovativeness on customer loyalty.External religious motivation weakened the positive effect of religiosity on spirituality and customer loyalty and weakened the negetive effect of religiosity on innovativeness and customer loyalty.Based on the above analyses,this study demonstrated the theoretical contribution and the management implications of these results and provided the strategies and suggestions from the view of religiosity for enterprises to promote customer loyalty.