A Study Of The Relationship Between Online Store Customer Bonding Tactics And Customer Value

Relationship marketing has been the new paradigm of marketing, and the emergency of the Internet hasn't changed the demand of establishing relationships with customers. Actually, since online shopping is developing rapidly, it's getting more and more important for online stores to retain long-term, intimate customer relationships. Customer bonding tactics is one of the important theories in relationship marketing, but the related research in China is lacking.This paper reviewed related literatures about customer bonding tactics at first, then conducted a qualitative interview, and developed a measurement for customer bonding tactics which is suitable for Chinese B2C online shopping industry, to set a foundation for further research. Then we reviewed related literatures about customer value and loyalty, and proposed that different customer bonding tactics would influence different dimension of customer value independently. We also discussed the relationship among three dimensions of customer value and their influence on loyalty. On this basis, we constructed a theoretical model and tested it with empirical study.The empirical research provided support for the model. The results show financial bonding tactic has no influence on outcome value, and we gave some explanation; social bonding tactic has positive effect on emotion value; structural bonding tactic has more effect on procedure value than it has on outcome value. Besides, all three dimensions have effect on loyalty, and the procedure value has the greatest impact, that indicates convenience is the most important benefit of online shopping. And there are relationships among different dimensions of customer value either. At last, we discussed the results and pointed out contributions and managerial implications and future directions.