Ladies First: Using a Loyalty Phase Model to Gain Insight into Gender Differences in Service Evaluations (An Extended Abstract)

Abstract

Marketers constantly strive to achieve loyal, committed customers, but few companies are ultimately successful. Thus, a better understanding of loyalty, its effects, and an improved measurement model is needed. The current research creates unique measures of loyalty based on Oliver’s (1997, 1999) conceptualization of loyalty as differing cognitive-affective-conative-action levels. Specifically, the conceptualization identifies consumers as either cognitive, affective, conative, or action loyal to a firm in relation to competitor service providers. Items related to specific service benefits determine the cognitive loyalty phase. Affective loyalty reflects whether a customer “likes” a service provider. Commitment and purchase intention items are used to determine if customers are conative loyal. Finally, action loyalty items reflect deeply held motivations to purchase from a service provider.