• Journal of Distribution Research
• /
• v.17 no.1
• /
• pp.87-115
• /
• 2012

Introduction: In these days, a loyalty program is one of the most common marketing mechanisms (Lacey & Sneath, 2006; Nues & Dreze, 2006; Uncles et al., 20003). In recent years, Coalition Loyalty Program is more noticeable as one of progressed forms. In the past, loyalty program was operating independently by single product brand or single retail channel brand. Now, companies using Coalition Loyalty Program share their programs as one single service and companies to participate to this program continue to have benefits from their existing program as well as positive spillover effect from the other participating network companies. Instead of consumers to earn or spend points from single retail channel or brand, consumers will have more opportunities to utilize their points and be able to purchase other participating companies products. Issues that are related to form of loyalty programs are essentially connected with consumers' perceived view on convenience of using its program. This can be a problem for distribution companies' strategic marketing plan. Although Coalition Loyalty Program is popular corporate marketing strategy to most companies, only few researches have been published. However, compared to independent loyalty program, coalition loyalty program operated by third parties of partnership has following conditions: Companies cannot autonomously modify structures of program for individual companies' benefits, and there is no guarantee to operate and to participate its program continuously by signing a contract. Thus, it is important to conduct the study on how coalition loyalty program affects companies' success and its process as much as conducting the study on effects of independent program. This study will complement the lack of coalition loyalty program study. The purpose of this study is to find out how consumer loyalty affects affiliated brands, its cause and mechanism. The past study about loyalty program only provided the variation of performance analysis, but this study will specifically focus on causes of results. In order to do these, this study is designed and to verify three primary objects as following; First, based on opinions of Switching Barriers (Fornell, 1992; Ping, 1993; Jones, et at., 2000) about causes of loyalty of coalition brand, 'brand attractiveness' and 'brand switching cost' are antecedents and causes of change in 'brand loyalty' will be investigated. Second, influence of consumers' perception and attitude prior to joining coalition loyalty program, influence of program in retail brands, brand attractiveness and spillover effect of switching cost after joining coalition program will be verified. Finally, the study will apply 'prior brand preference' as a variable and will provide a relationship between effects of coalition loyalty program and prior preference level. Hypothesis Hypothesis 1. After joining coalition loyalty program, more preferred brand (compared to less preferred brand) will increase influence on brand attractiveness to brand loyalty. Hypothesis 2. After joining coalition loyalty program, less preferred brand (compared to more preferred brand) will increase influence on brand switching cost to brand loyalty. Hypothesis 3. (1)Brand attractiveness and (2)brand switching cost of more preferred brand (before joining the coalition loyalty program) will influence more positive effects from (1)program attractiveness and (2)program switching cost of coalition loyalty program (after joining) than less preferred brand. Hypothesis 4. After joining coalition loyalty program, (1)brand attractiveness and (2)brand switching cost of more preferred brand will receive more positive impacts from (1)program attractiveness and (2)program switching cost of coalition loyalty program than less preferred brand. Hypothesis 5. After joining coalition loyalty program, (1)brand attractiveness and (2)brand switching cost of more preferred brand will receive less impacts from (1)brand attractiveness and (2)brand switching cost of different brands (having different preference level), which joined simultaneously, than less preferred brand. Method : In order to validate hypotheses, this study will apply experimental method throughout virtual scenario of coalition loyalty program if consumers have used or available for the actual brands. The experiment is conducted twice to participants. In a first experiment, the study will provide six coalition brands which are already selected based on prior research. The survey asked each brand attractiveness, switching cost, and loyalty after they choose high preference brand and low preference brand. One hour break was provided prior to the second experiment. In a second experiment, virtual coalition loyalty program "SaveBag" was introduced to participants. Participants were informed that "SaveBag" will be new alliance with six coalition brands from the first experiment. Brand attractiveness and switching cost about coalition program were measured and brand attractiveness and switching cost of high preference brand and low preference brand were measured as same method of first experiment. Limitation and future research This study shows limitations of effects of coalition loyalty program by using virtual scenario instead of actual research. Thus, future study should compare and analyze CLP panel data to provide more in-depth information. In addition, this study only proved the effectiveness of coalition loyalty program. However, there are two types of loyalty program, which are Single and Coalition, and success of coalition loyalty program will be dependent on market brand power and prior customer attitude. Therefore, it will be interesting to compare effects of two programs in the future.

• Journal of Distribution Research
• /
• v.17 no.1
• /
• pp.1-36
• /
• 2012

Service failure is one of the major reasons for customer defection. As the business environment gets tougher and more competitive, a single service failure might bring about fatal consequences to a service provider or a firm. Sometimes a failure won't end up with an unsatisfied customer's simple complaining but with a wide-spread animosity against the service provider or the firm, leading to a threat to the firm's survival itself in the society. Therefore, we are in need of comprehensive understandings of complainants' attitudes and behaviors toward service failures and firm's recovery efforts. Even though a failure itself couldn't be fixed completely, marketers should repair the mind and heart of unsatisfied customers, which can be regarded as an successful recovery strategy in the end. As the outcome of recovery efforts exerted by service providers or firms, recovery of the relationship between customer and service provider need to put on the top in the recovery goal list. With these motivations, the study investigates how service failure and recovery makes the changes in dynamics of fundamental elements of customer-firm relationship, such as customer affection, customer trust and loyalty intention by comparing two time points, before the service failure and after the recovery, focusing on the effects of recovery satisfaction and the failure severity. We adopted La & Choi (2012)'s framework for development of the research model that was based on the previous research stream like Yim et al. (2008) and Thomson et al. (2005). The pivotal background theories of the model are mainly from relationship marketing and social relationships of social psychology. For example, Love, Emotional attachment, Intimacy, and Equity theories regarding human relationships were reviewed. As the results, when recovery satisfaction is high, customer affection and customer trust that were established before the service failure are carried over to the future after the recovery. However, when recovery satisfaction is low, customer-firm relationship that had already established in the past are not carried over but broken up. Regardless of the degree of recovery satisfaction, once a failure occurs loyalty intention is not carried over to the future and the impact of customer trust on loyalty intention becomes stronger. Such changes imply that customers become more prudent and more risk-aversive than the time prior to service failure. The impact of severity of failure on customer affection and customer trust matters only when recovery satisfaction is low. When recovery satisfaction is high, customer affection and customer trust become severity-proof. Interestingly, regardless of the degree of recovery satisfaction, failure severity has a significant negative influence on loyalty intention. Loyalty intention is the most fragile target when a service failure occurs no matter how severe the failure criticality is. Consequently, the ultimate goal of service recovery should be the restoration of customer-firm relationship and recovery of customer trust should be the primary objective to accomplish for a successful recovery performance. Especially when failure severity is high, service recovery should be perceived highly satisfied by the complainants because failure severity matters more when recovery satisfaction is low. Marketers can implement recovery strategies to enhance emotional appeals as well as fair treatments since the both impacts of affection and trust on loyalty intention are significant. In the case of high severity of failure, recovery efforts should be exerted to overreach customer expectation, designed to directly repair customer trust and elaborately designed in the focus of customer-firm communications during the interactional recovery process to affect customer trust rebuilding indirectly. Because it is a longer and harder way to rebuild customer-firm relationship for high severity cases, low recovery satisfaction cannot guarantee customer retention. To prevent customer defection due to service failure of high severity, unexpected rewards as a recovery will be likely to be useful since those will lead to customer delight or customer gratitude toward the service firm. Based on the results of analyses, theoretical and managerial implications are presented. Limitations and future research ideas are also discussed.

• Asia Marketing Journal
• /
• v.14 no.1
• /
• pp.99-130
• /
• 2012

Service failure and a poor service recovery may lead loyal customers to try to aggressively punish the service firm. We use perceived betrayal and desire for vengeance as the key constructs to understand customer retaliation. Perceived betrayal is defined as a customer's belief that a firm has intentionally violated what is normative in the context of their relationship. And the desire for vengeance is defined as the retaliatory feelings that consumers feel toward a firm, such as the desire to exert harm on the firm. The perceived betrayal and the desire for vengeance are key antecedents of retaliatory behaviors such as vindictive complaining, negative WOM and third-party complaining for publicity. The empirical results suggest that betrayal is a key motivational factor that lead customers to restore fairness by making use of all means, including retaliation. We also find that relationship quality has effect on a customer's response to a failure in service recovery. As the levels of relationship increases, a violation of the proper fairness has a stronger effect on the sense of betrayal experienced by customers. Considerable research has investigated consumer responses to dissatisfaction. But our study examine the response of outraged and highly frustrated consumers. We focus on emotional and behavioral processes that have not been covered by previous dissatisfaction researches and which are unique to outraged consumers caused by extremely dissatisfied purchase experience. It has recently been pointed out by various mass media that the customers not only have positive effects on the company performance but also put the company in crisis. It has often been reported that one customer's dissatisfaction, for example, never ends as it is, and it tends to grow for retaliating upon the company, depending on the level of seriousness of the dissatisfaction. This sometimes leads to a lawsuit against the company. Our study focuses on the customers' emotional and behavioral responses induced by their extreme dissatisfactions. We divided the customer groups into the customers with high relationship quality and the customers with low relationship quality, and the difference between two groups is examined. The objective of this study is to comprehend the causal relationship between the feeling of betrayal caused by the service failure and the retaliatory behavior triggered by the desire of revenge. Our study is divided into three parts. First, a causal relationship between perceived unfairness and the perceived betrayal and desire for revenge. Second, the effect of the perceived betrayal and desire for revenge on the retaliatory behavior is investigated. Finally, the moderating role of relationship quality in the causal relationship between the unfairness in service recovery and the perceived betrayal is analyzed. This study finds the following empirical results. The distributive unfairness, procedural unfairness and interactional unfairness had significant effects on the perceived betrayal. Especially, the perceived distributive unfairness results in the highest perceived betrayal. When the service company does not provide customers proper and sufficient compensation for the failure, they feel the strong sense of betrayal. And in the causal relationship between the perceived betrayal, desire for revenge and retaliatory behavior, the perceived betrayal has significant effects on e desire for revenge. In addition desire for revenge has significant effects on negative word of mouth, retaliatory complaining behavior and publicity of complaints through third group. Therefore the perceived unfairness has effects on retaliatory behavior through the mediation of the perceived betrayal and desire for revenge. Finally the moderating role of relationship quality was examined in the relationship between the unfairness and perceived betrayal. If the customers experienced the perceived unfairness in the process of service recovery, the customers with high relationship quality feel the stronger perceived betrayal than the customers with low relationship quality do. When they experience the double service failure, the customer group with high relationship quality accumulating the sense of trust feel the more perceived betrayal than the customer with low relationship quality who do not have strong trust. The contribution of this study is to find the effect of the service failure on the retaliatory behavior with the moderating roles of relationship quality. The dimensions of unfairness in service recovery is found to have differential effects on the perceived betrayal, desire for revenge. And these differential effect is moderated by the level of relationship quality.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.25 no.4
• /
• pp.1-33
• /
• 2019

The small and medium sized enterprises (hereinafter SMEs) are already at a competitive disadvantaged when compared to large companies with more abundant resources. Manufacturing SMEs not only need a lot of information needed for new product development for sustainable growth and survival, but also seek networking to overcome the limitations of resources, but they are faced with limitations due to their size limitations. In a new era in which connectivity increases the complexity and uncertainty of the business environment, SMEs are increasingly urged to find information and solve networking problems. In order to solve these problems, the government funded research institutes plays an important role and duty to solve the information asymmetry problem of SMEs. The purpose of this study is to identify the differentiating characteristics of SMEs that utilize the public information support infrastructure provided by SMEs to enhance the innovation capacity of SMEs, and how they contribute to corporate performance. We argue that we need an infrastructure for providing information support to SMEs as part of this effort to strengthen of the role of government funded institutions; in this study, we specifically identify the target of such a policy and furthermore empirically demonstrate the effects of such policy-based efforts. Our goal is to help establish the strategies for building the information supporting infrastructure. To achieve this purpose, we first classified the characteristics of SMEs that have been found to utilize the information supporting infrastructure provided by government funded institutions. This allows us to verify whether selection bias appears in the analyzed group, which helps us clarify the interpretative limits of our study results. Next, we performed mediator and moderator effect analysis for multiple variables to analyze the process through which the use of information supporting infrastructure led to an improvement in external networking capabilities and resulted in enhancing product competitiveness. This analysis helps identify the key factors we should focus on when offering indirect support to SMEs through the information supporting infrastructure, which in turn helps us more efficiently manage research related to SME supporting policies implemented by government funded institutions. The results of this study showed the following. First, SMEs that used the information supporting infrastructure were found to have a significant difference in size in comparison to domestic R&D SMEs, but on the other hand, there was no significant difference in the cluster analysis that considered various variables. Based on these findings, we confirmed that SMEs that use the information supporting infrastructure are superior in size, and had a relatively higher distribution of companies that transact to a greater degree with large companies, when compared to the SMEs composing the general group of SMEs. Also, we found that companies that already receive support from the information infrastructure have a high concentration of companies that need collaboration with government funded institution. Secondly, among the SMEs that use the information supporting infrastructure, we found that increasing external networking capabilities contributed to enhancing product competitiveness, and while this was no the effect of direct assistance, we also found that indirect contributions were made by increasing the open marketing capabilities: in other words, this was the result of an indirect-only mediator effect. Also, the number of times the company received additional support in this process through mentoring related to information utilization was found to have a mediated moderator effect on improving external networking capabilities and in turn strengthening product competitiveness. The results of this study provide several insights that will help establish policies. KISTI's information support infrastructure may lead to the conclusion that marketing is already well underway, but it intentionally supports groups that enable to achieve good performance. As a result, the government should provide clear priorities whether to support the companies in the underdevelopment or to aid better performance. Through our research, we have identified how public information infrastructure contributes to product competitiveness. Here, we can draw some policy implications. First, the public information support infrastructure should have the capability to enhance the ability to interact with or to find the expert that provides required information. Second, if the utilization of public information support (online) infrastructure is effective, it is not necessary to continuously provide informational mentoring, which is a parallel offline support. Rather, offline support such as mentoring should be used as an appropriate device for abnormal symptom monitoring. Third, it is required that SMEs should improve their ability to utilize, because the effect of enhancing networking capacity through public information support infrastructure and enhancing product competitiveness through such infrastructure appears in most types of companies rather than in specific SMEs.