Extension Of Switching Costs Antecedents Based On Customers’ Social Ties

Because of the significant effects on customer loyalty, and moderating effects on the relationship between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, customer switching costs have already become a research focus of marketing, management and economics studies. One of the most popular and typical typologies of customer switching costs have been put forward by Burnham in2003, which including three types and eight facets of customer switching costs, and three types of customer switching costs antecedents (which are the factors and reasons that could cause customer switching costs). Early researchers have already suggested strategies to facilitate customer switching costs by manipulating customer switching costs antecedents, and these strategies have already demonstrated the important functions and significance of these antecedents. However, after Burnham put forward this typology, the development of customer switching costs antecedents have stayed stagnant.Besides, the current theoretical model of customer switching costs antecedents takes only characteristics of market and attributes of individual customer into consideration, it doesn’t concern the effects of interpersonal relationship between different customers (such as customer social ties) on switching costs. Moreover, some researches on customer social ties have demonstrated that the interpersonal relationship between customers can hinder customers’switching behavior to some extent, therefore facilitate customer loyalty.This research aims at including customer social ties as a new type of switching costs antecedent. And based on previous studies, by following restrict measurement development processes, constructing theoretical model, launching questionnaire collection, examining the reliability and validity of collected data, analyzing the data and testing the model and hypotheses, this study has successfully including customer social ties into the traditional switching costs antecedents model and demonstrated its significant effects and effecting mechanisms on the three types and eight facets of switching costs. The conclusion of this study has developed and perfected the typology and contents of customer switching costs antecedents to some degree, and it also have certain practical significance on enterprise management.