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Institute of Sport and Leisure Policy, School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK
Abstract
Although the literature on marketing has recognised customer satisfaction as a signicant antecedent to customer loyalty, the
relationships between both satisfaction constructstransaction-specic and overallwith customer loyalty have mostly been studied
separately. As customer loyalty has therefore been infrequently investigated with simultaneous consideration for its attitudinal and
behavioural dimensions, this study aimed to explore the satisfactionloyalty relationships according to a double view of the concepts.
Empirical analysis in a sports-service context highlighted the role of overall satisfaction on attitudinal loyalty and minimised the role of
transaction-specic satisfaction, and therefore found that neither customer satisfaction nor attitudinal loyalty predict customer
repurchase behaviour.
r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Repurchase behaviour; Attitudinal loyalty; Transaction-specic and overall satisfaction; Service; Membership; Sport club
1. Introduction
Customer loyalty, a major theme in marketing research,
has become an essential concern for managers, and a
strategic obsession for many. This increasing concern has
mainly been due to intense competition, particularly in
service industries, and the current focus on the relationship
between consumers and organisations, which is the core of
the relational marketing approach.
Basically, marketing research now recognises that
acquiring new customers costs more than retaining current
ones (Reichheld, 1996). However, although customer
loyalty has been recurrently studied, the psychological
processes underlying its formation are still unknown, even
if numerous antecedents have been identied. Among these
antecedents, both researchers and practitioners have
attributed a particular status to customer satisfaction,
recognising it as the main antecedent of loyalty. However,
they have not clearly established the nature of the
relationship, which depends on whether researchers mea-
sure stated intentions or actual behaviour.
This study has therefore attempted to test the satisfac-
tionloyalty relationship based on four constructs which
are usually investigated separately. These are transaction-
specic satisfaction, overall satisfaction, attitudinal loyalty,
and repurchase behaviour. This study aims to reinforce
some existing research ndings by replicating models
adapted from Jones and Suh (2000) in the context of a
different service industry, a type of exercise which is for
Hunter (2001) still underestimated. The reinforcement of
ndings is enhanced by combining the satisfactionloyalty
relationships with a classical bi-dimensional view of
customer loyalty. Indeed, this study relies on both
customer intentions and repurchasing behaviour for the
behavioural dimension of loyalty, which is still rare
according to Chandon et al. (2005).
2. Theoretical framework
2.1. The satisfactionloyalty relationship
According to Henning-Thurau and Klee (1997), studies
dealing with the relationship between customer satisfaction
and loyalty can be classied into three groups. The rst
comes from service management literature and studies the
ARTICLE IN PRESS
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0969-6989/$ - see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jretconser.2007.11.004