ABSTRACT
A critical issue for the continued success of a company is its capacity to build customer loyalty. The concept of customer loyalty has been researched extensively in business and service contexts and is believed to be a company’s most enduring asset (Bolton et al. 2004). Oliver (1997: p. 392) defines customer loyalty as ‘a deeply held commitment to rebuy or repatronize a preferred product/service consistently in the future, thereby causing repetitive same brand set purchasing, despite situational influences and marketing efforts having the potential to cause switching behaviour’. There are two dimensions of customer loyalty: behavioural loyalty and attitudinal loyalty (Dekimpe et al. 1997; Dick and Basu 1994; Jacoby and Chestnut 1978; Yi and La 2004). According to Hammond et al. (1996), behavioural loyalty is the consumer’s tendency to repurchase. Attitudinal loyalty, on the other hand, as defined by Jacoby and Chestnut (1978), refers to the customer’s predisposition towards a brand, which is a function of psychological processes. Attitudinal loyalty is often measured by the degree of customers’ revisit intentions and their recommendations to others (Li and Petrick 2008; Oppermann 2000; Yoon and Uysal 2005).
