The Study Of Different Customer Loyalty Program Structure On Customer Perceived Status

As an important means of customer relationship management, customer loyaltyprogram has been widely used in the practice of enterprises’ marketing activity.Customer loyalty program can be found inmany industries, such as hotel, airline,retail industry, tele-com industry and so on.However, many companies use customerloyalty program blindly, ignoring whether the program is effective. Existing researchhave shown that different loyalty structure will bring different feeling to customers.There exist important significance for practice and theory in analyzing whether theloyalty program is better forming by two tiers or three tiers, whether soft benefit orhard benefit will bring more superiority to the customers in top tier, how to designloyalty program right for different industries.Therefore, the study in the context ofdomestic consumption, loyalty program structure in different industries perceptionaffect the status of top-level customers will have strong significance in practical andtheory. Thus, this study will help company to design and implement the loyaltyprogram based on the industry the company in and its own characteristic.In this study, the aviation industry and retail loyalty program will be the targetindustry, on the basis of the current situation that the relevant domestic theory study isinadequate while the practice need theory guide urgently. These two industries haveused loyalty program widely and have big difference in exclusiveness. Byexperimentation, the study will discuss how different industries,different interests ofthe top customer in loyalty program structure different structure and the change ofloyalty program benefits will affect the customer perceived status.The study found that:(1) In this high exclusive industry like aviation industry,the three layers hierarchical structure can improve the customer’s perceived statusbetter than two layers hierarchical structure.The smaller the proportion of the top layer,the higherstatus the top level customer can perceive; moreover, in the aviationindustry, the soft benefitscan enhance the top layer customers’ perceived status betterthanrigidbenefits.(2) In the retailsector, if the provided benefit is soft, the top layercustomers’perceived status won’t change obviously regardless thehierarchicalstructure is three layers or two layers,while the ratio of the top layerwon’t affect thestatus; but the provided benefit is rigid, the situation will change,the three layershierarchical structure andthe smaller the proportion of the top layer can improve thecustomer’s perceived status. This study provides a newway of thinking for the designing of customer loyaltyprogram. In the past, enterprises didn’t combine the industry’scharacteristics in theimplementation of loyalty program, also didn’tt consider change of customer’sperceived status in their psychologyand emotion, leading loyalty programcannotreally play a role in retaining customers. To solve this, the focus of this studyis the change of different loyalty program structures’ affect on customer’s perceivedstatus. Only aloyalty program which can consider the industry company in and thestatus of the customer’s perception can help the company keep its relationship withcustomer well, then promote the customer’s loyalty.