Channel Satisfaction’s Effect On Enterprise Channel Response:the Role Of Long-term Orientation And The Relationship Length

In recent years, China’s economic development is growing rapidly, the retail industry is also affected by economic development, industry competition is increasingly fierce. In order to ensure that they are able to obtain a stable and sustainable development and long-term competitive advantage, enterprises gradually shift their attention to channel resources, a fast and efficient channel has become one of the most important conditions for the success of the enterprises. Close cooperation between dealers and suppliers can greatly improve the competitiveness of the organization and achieve a stable performance improvement. However, even if enterprises have become increasingly aware of the importance of having a stable and long-term channel relationship, there are still a large number of companies choose to terminate the relationship with the current partners and exit the channel every year, and undoubtedly channel exit will bring great losses to both channel partners.In 1970, Hirschman proposed the possible way that the relationship members responding to the channel with problem, that is, the EVL model, Ping introduced it into the background of marketing channel in 1993, and then began to study the reaction behavior when channel member was faced with relationship problems by research of empirical analysis. Among them, exit and voice are two kinds of active reaction mode. At the same time, the article found that channel satisfaction had a significant effect on relationship exit and voice, Ping also regarded channel satisfaction as one of the most important variables which influence the reaction way in his articles. However, still no studies focus on the mechanism that how channels satisfaction influences the enterprise channel response. Therefore, long-term relationship orientation of channel members is drawn into channel response study framework; it is considered that the effect of channel member satisfaction on the reaction behavior is achieved through its long-term orientation which plays a mediating role in the effects of satisfaction on channel response.After a comprehensive and detailed study of documents, the paper summarizes the related theories of channel reaction, channel satisfaction and long-term orientation, and then brings up a theory frame and a number of assumptions. This paper takes the channel relationship between manufacturers and distributors in the brand furniture channel as the research object, collecting 144 applications by using questionnaire survey to furniture dealers. The study uses Amos and SPSS 19.0 to analyze data to make sure that our hypothesis is more scientifically and strictly. The paper discusses the research findings, gives corresponding managerial suggestions and future research directions.From the point of view of channel dealerships, we make an empirical study of relationship between the channel satisfaction and their relationship exit propensity and voice. Findings show that channel satisfaction exerts significantly negative effects on exit-propensity and significantly positive effects on voice. Moreover, long-term orientation plays a full mediating role in the effects of satisfaction on voice, but it has no mediating effects between satisfaction and exit-propensity. Relationship length plays a negative role in regulating channel satisfaction’s influence on voice. The contribution of this research is that the paper introduces the important variable, long-term orientation, into the research model in the background of the furniture market, testing the influence of channel satisfaction and long-term orientation on voice and exit propensity, verifying whether the long-term orientation plays a mediating role in the effects of satisfaction on channel response and identifying the mechanism that how channels satisfaction influences the enterprise channel response. At the same time, the paper put Ping’s research in the channel background of China to testify the influence of channel satisfaction and long-term orientation on voice and exit propensity, thus further enrich the literature of the channel response behavior, verifying the applicability of western theory in Chinese market.