An Empirical Study On The Key Factors Influencing Customer's Repurchase Intention

The question what influence consumer's purchase decision has attracted quite a lot of researcher's attention for a long time, especially in the field of repurchase intention and behavior. As a common sense that the cost of attracting a new customer is a couple times more than that to retain an old one. So the importance of forming a substantial group of loyal customers is beyond all doubt. Customer satisfaction has once been deemed as the key factor influencing customer loyalty, but a lot of subsequent researches prove that even satisfied customers defect quite often, but there's no clear explanation so far. Now, lots of researchers have switched to customer value to find the reasons, but also, what's the difference between customer value and customer perceived value, whether the customer perceived value has a direct influence on the customer repurchase intention is still inexplicit.This paper bases on the literature review, constructs a customer repurchase intention model on Oliver's loyalty phase theory. The model includes 11 factors: brand preference, cumulative satisfaction, variety seeking, attractiveness of alternatives, switching cost, (the five dimensions), customer repurchase intention, episodic satisfaction, customer perceived value, customer perceived fairness, customer perceived benefits, customer perceived cost. Through the empirical study, which includes two samples: the exploratory sample (n = 240) and the confirmative sample (n = 288), this repurchase intention model has been basically validated.Three conclusions have been generalized: first, customer repurchase intention is influenced mainly from five dimensions defined as before, although there is other factors such as public opinions,friend's recommendation and so on. Second, the reasons why satisfied customer defect probably lie in that: the satisfaction measured in many researches was episodic satisfaction but not cumulative satisfaction; even the customer has formed cumulative satisfaction with a brand, but it is the five dimensions that influence customer repurchase intention all together. Third, the most important antecedents of customer perceived value(CPV) are customer perceived fairness,customer perceived benefit,customer perceived cost; CPV does not have a direct path, but an indirect path towards customer repurchase intention.