Australasian Marketing Journal

Consumer loyalty may be defined as a singular concept, usually as an attitude toward the loyalty object or as repeatpatronage behaviour; alternatively, the definition may combine attitude and behaviour in either an additive or an interactive expression.

We argue that definitions of loyalty are useful if they predict phenomena such as recommendation, search and retention (loyalty outcomes). In three consumer fields, we find that combination measures of customer loyalty often perform poorly as predictors of loyalty outcomes compared with singular measures since recommendation is predicted by attitude but not by repeat patronage, whereas retention and search behaviour are predicted better by repeat patronage than by attitude. We also find that the prediction of loyalty outcomes is not improved by the inclusion of an interaction term in the model.

On this evidence, we argue that combination concepts of loyalty are of limited value. Further, we find that there is no form of loyalty that consistently predicts all the different loyalty outcomes and, therefore, we should abandon the idea of a general concept of loyalty.

Brand and store managers are anxious to obtain high “loyalty,” as operationalized by repeat purchase behaviour. In this paper, we introduce the Repeated Binary Logit (RBL) model, which analyses directly the impact of covariates on repeat purchase, and which can be described as an extension of traditional logistic regression. We present empirical applications of RBL, and we discuss its relationships to several classical models.

This paper develops a causal model of environmental attitudes using measures of the dominant social paradigm of Western industrial societies. Four components of the DSP framework are examined with regard to environmental attitudes and perception of change using a sample of university students from Australia and New Zealand. The results indicate that one's belief in the DSP has a negative effect on both environmental attitudes and perception of change necessary to ameliorate degradation of the environment. Thus, while public policy favors increasing awareness of and interest in the environment, policy instruments may remain ineffective in producing lasting change if the components of the DSP remain unchanged. It is argued that public policy ought to be directed at changing the DSP so that its negative effects will be minimized.

Firms are not isolated economic actors. Their performance depends on more than their own efforts, capabilities and resources. It is also a function of the efforts and resources of others and on the relations a firm has both directly and indirectly with these counterparts. Based on these premises, we examine whether a model of international business relationship performance developed in a Western business context generalises to a Chinese context. Contrary to expectations, given the differences in business cultures, our results suggest that the same model applies in Swedish and Chinese samples of international supplier-customer relations. The exception is that connected business relations have a significant indirect effect on performance in the Chinese but not the Swedish sample. Differences also exist in the way some items used to measure two relationship dimensions operate in the two contexts. Management implications of our results and future research directions are discussed.

Over the past ten years, the use of the Internet and e-mail as communication tools has become ubiquitous. In the survey arena, the rising costs of gathering data have been partly compensated by the use of the internet and e-based technologies which offer a range of new, relatively cost effective survey design and delivery options. This paper reports on two studies where Microsoft Excel was used to design and gather data without the additional investment associated with specialist programs. Study one examines the development of a multi-attribute survey conducted to create a new scale using a local (Australian) population of students. The second describes the use of Excel in a stated choice experiment that was sent to an international sample of museum managers. These studies show that it requires minimal programming skill on behalf of the researcher whilst offering the many of the cost, administrative and questionnaire design benefits seen with specialist software and Internet delivery. We conclude that Microsoft Excel can be considered when designing online surveys as it provides a wide range of features and benefits that allow for flexible, rich instrument design and fast, potentially accurate, data collection, checking and entry.