Customer Loyalty Research Based On Relationship Marketing Strategy

With the transition of market conditions from seller's to buyer's, which intensifies the competition further, marketing keystone has been turning from exchange to relationship unconsciously. Now relationship marketing has been on the academic and practical frontiers. On the basis of a lot of existing literature, this paper investigates the influence of relationship marketing on customer loyalty on the customer's view. This thesis focuses around two subjects. The first is to explore and confirm the constructs of proposed model; the second is to evaluate the influence of each antecedent on commitment and trust and to investigate the interrelationships between commitment, trust and customer loyalty. A proposed structure model, including five antecedents of commitment-trust and ten hypotheses, is developed and also empirically tested in order to resolve them.A questionnaire survey is carried on among the service firm by random sample, in addition to individual interviews. 296 valid samples were collected out of 400 in two months with effective returns-ratio at 74%. The data has been tested in accordance with the general rule of construct validity and reliability. The research model and hypotheses are empirically tested using SEM technology and finds that: (1) the final customer loyalty model based on commitment-trust relationship; (2) the effects of antecedents on commitment and trust, the effects of commitment and trust on customer loyalty. According to the conclusions, the proposed model is believed to be good, and nine out of ten hypotheses are supported with one unsupported.While considering the complexity of the influence on customer loyalty, the limitations of this study are unavoidable, and some advices are suggested for subsequent research.This paper has five parts:Chapter 1 introduces research background, objective and method.Chapter 2 reviews the theory of customer loyalty and relationship marketing.Chapter 3 draws out the research model and hypotheses, explains measures of constructs, questionnaire design and pretest.Chapter 4 analyses the data by factors and correlation analysis, tests construct validity and Cronbach's a coefficients. Model and hypotheses also are tested.Chapter 5 gives research conclusions, contributions, limitations and future directions.