How to increase customers commitment and loyalty to the products - Research Paper Example

Many past research have supported the link between commitment and a firm’s profitability. Your firm wants to know how to increase your customer’s commitment and loyalty to your products. Discuss the different types of commitment in marketing, and how commitment may be measured. These days many commercial organizations seek to earn their customers’ commitment in order to remain successful and profitable. Commitment itself has been studied by the fields of psychology, marketing and organizational behavior, and in relation to marketing it can be defined as a desire to maintain a positive and long-term relationship (Moorman, Zaltman, and Desphande 1992, 316). Such a relationship is established with a brand, product, service, or the company itself. A committed customer, thus, is the one who is in certain psychological state that motivates the person to buy the company’s product or service regularly. Commitment, as Jones et al. outline (2010), has some specific characteristics. First of all, it is targeted – a person can be committed to different things, including company’s product or the company itself. The subject of the commitment is, thus, what connects an individual with the organization through the person’s psychological attachment. Secondly, commitment may take different forms. Among them are affective, normative and continuance commitment. Each type of commitment has a different psychological basis. Finally, each of the three types of commitment generates “different effects on various relationship-related outcomes” (Jones et al. 2010, 20). This means that, depending on which type of commitment a customer experiences, the individual is more or less likely to be willing to maintain the relationship with the subject of commitment. Similarly, the type of commitment determines how loyal that individual is to the brand or company, and how likely he or she is to abandon the brand or company. Affective commitment, according to Gruen, Summers and Acito (2000) can be defined as a degree of customer’s psychological attachment to the commitment target. This type of commitment is based on customer’s positive feelings towards the subject of commitment (Gruen, Summers, and Acito 2000, 36) and is a predictor of such responses as advocacy, co-production, willingness to pay more, as well as the number of purchased items (Jones et al. 2010, 22). Therefore, in order to build affective commitment of a customer the company has to make sure its brand, product or service evokes positive associations. Such positive associations can be supported by good company image, its CSR activities, or simply well-designed advertising campaign. Normative commitment is based on person’s feeling of being obliged to the subject of commitment. This feeling is usually evoked by certain social norms and social pressure for acting in a certain manner. Feeling obliged, the customer is more willing to help the company by means of, for instance, paying more for its product, helping in some way or recommending the product to others, thus also helping the organization. This type of commitment is more appropriate for organizations that are able to devote their resources to serving some positive social projects. For instance, a company might tell that it will send part from the received revenue to hungry children of Africa. In this situation an individual might choose this particular company to buy from because he or she feels obliged to help the children. Continuance commitment is based on “perceived costs associated with terminating the relationship” (Jones et al. 2010, 24). If, for instance, there are no alternatives to some product, or the customer has already invested much into certain company, the customer may feel continuance commitment. The cost of switching to another brand (product, company, etc.) is considered by such a client to be too high. In comparison to emotional affective and moral normative commitment, continuance commitment is the most rational form of commitment. Continuance commitment may be evoked by the fact that starting using another company’s product or service is relatively more expensive than cooperating with the previous one. It should also be mentioned that all the three types of commitment are interrelated. As the research of Jones et al (2010) indicates, affective commitment “mediates the effects of normative and continuance commitments” (Jones et al. 2010, 16). The commitment itself is very influenced by the cost of terminating the relationship, as well as by shared values – if values of the company and the customer match, such customer is less likely to switch to another brand. In addition, commitment is influenced through trust – by communication and opportunistic behavior (Morgan and Hunt 1994, 24) Walter, Mueller and Helfert (2004) outline three dimensions of commitment in relation to relationship marketing. Among them is affective commitment, which is customer’s positive attitude towards continuation of the relationship. Instrumental commitment, according to the scientists, takes place when a customer invests something, like time, money, or some other resource, into the relationship. Temporal dimension of commitments signifies whether the relationship exists in the long run (Walter, Mueller, and Helfert 2004, 3). While all forms of commitment are equally important for a company, it is also necessary to be able to measure customers’ commitment. Depending on the perspective, commitment may be measured in different ways. One option is to use questionnaires to measure involvement, differentiation, familiarity, and importance, all of which have a direct relation to commitment. Another option is to use questions about importance, caring, worth the effort and a direct question of commitment (Shuv-Ami 2006, 1). Shuv-Ami (2006), however, proposes another approach of measuring commitment. The author suggests that the best way to measure commitment is to do it on the basis of four emotional and behavioral underlying constructs. They are: brand (company, product, etc.) loyalty, which makes the person a returning customer satisfaction, which requires the company to ensure the client gets pleasurable experience involvement, which determines intensity of the attachment attachment One more option is to measure commitment through loyalty. Emotional loyalty can be used as a commitment scale. It is also possible, according to Shuv-Ami (2006) to use a “scale using a four agree/disagree items; (1) "I consider myself to be loyal to (brand)" (2) "Only under extreme circumstances would I consider purchasing a brand of this product different from (brand), (3) "If the store was out of (brand), and I would go somewhere else to buy (brand)" and (4) "Even when another brand is on sale, I would prefer the brand (brand)” (Shuv-Ami 2006, 2). References Gruen, T., J. Summers, and F. Acito. 2000. Relationship Marketing Activities, Commitment, and Membership Behaviors in Professional Associations. Journal of Marketing 64(July): 34-49. Jones, T., G. Fox, S. Taylor, and L. Fabrigar. 2010. Service customer commitment and response. Journal of Services Marketing 24(1): 16- 28. Morgan, R., and S. Hunt. 1994. The Commitment-Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing. Journal of Marketing 58(July): 20-38. Moorman, C., G. Zaltman, and R. Desphande. 1992. Relationships Between Providers and Users of Market Research. Journal of Marketing Research 29(3): 314-329. Shuv-Ami, A. 2006. A New Brand Commitment Scale for Market Segmentation. The College of Management. http://anzmac2010.org/proceedings/pdf/anzmac10Final00134.pdf Accessed August 20, 2011 Walter, A., T. Mueller, and G. Helfert. 2004. The Impact of Satisfaction, Trust, and Relationship Value on Commitment: Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Results. IMP Group. http://www.impgroup.org/uploads/papers/131.pdf Accessed August 20, 2011. 2. A marketing professor claimed: “Customer satisfaction isn’t good enough anymore... we need to account for the customer’s emotions… how they feel about us deep inside their hearts”. Discuss the role of emotions in marketing and give some practical suggestions on how emotions can help sell a product of your choice. It is very common for marketing professionals to appeal to people’s emotions in order to sell and earn more. Indeed, as Bagozzi (1997, 309) outlines, emotions play a relatively important role in consumers’ decision-making. However, emotions, as well as the role they play in the decision-making process, should be distinguished from affect, moods and attitudes. Emotions are a totally different mental state that marks, mediates and moderates buying behavior of consumers (Bagozzi, Gopinath, and Nyer 1999, 184). Since emotions are often the determinant of people’s purchasing decisions, the role of emotions in marketing cannot be underestimated and raises much interest of the scientists. Bagozzi, Gopinath, and Nyer (1999, 184) even outline that for effective marketing important are emotions of both consumers and salespeople who communicate with those consumers. An emotion, in its turn, can be defined as a specific mental state which is a result of cognitive appraisals of thoughts or events. Furthermore, emotion is accompanied by specific physiological processes which may have a physical expression in a form of gestures and mimics. Emotion should also be distinguished from mood – though both have similar characteristics, moods, unlike emotions, last longer and are less intense. In addition, emotions, unlike moods, have a subject – are targeted at something. Therefore, the goal of marketers is to evoke emotions that support the needed buying behavior. Needed emotions, therefore, are the ones that bring a consumer to a state of readiness to buy. They act as motivational states (Kwak, Kim, and Hirt 2011, 225). Consequently, the major purpose of an organization is to evoke these types of emotions. Arousal is, therefore, a basic aspect of behavior related to emotions. In order to achieve its goal of selling more the company has to appeal to and evoke people’s emotions. For this purposes companies use purposely designed advertisements. On the basis of content such advertisements can be divided into tow categories. The first type of ads is advertisements that make a person think – such ads may focus on factual information or practical characteristics of a good or service (Bagozzi, Gopinath, and Nyer 1999, 184). Such an advertisement, therefore, tells a consumer about what specific and precise characteristics a product has, or how beneficial it is to use this particular product. The second type of ads is advertisements that directly appeal to people’s emotions. Such advertisements mainly outline not the beneficial qualities of a product, but rather the feelings or pleasure, comfort, or other positive mental states that are associated with the product. It is the situation when, actually, not the product itself is being sold, but rather the positive states or feelings the product will bring to the customer. Such ads appeal to people’s feelings and desires, making them ready to buy the lifestyle or shape they dream about. An individual may experience three types of affective responses to such ads. They are happy mood reactions, relaxing or pleasant reactions, and caring or tenderness. So, advertisements that evoke such reactions are more likely to help the company to sell more. That is exactly how appeal to people’s emotions is used for modeling consumer behavior (Kwak, Kim, and Hirt 2011, 225). When an event of an advertisement is appraised as relevant to person’s attitudes, values, motives and goals, the individual interprets and evaluates the event and potentially changes behavior in favor of the brand being advertised. Emotions in this case influence such stages of decision-making as evaluation, intension and choice. Furthermore, emotions have an impact on the process of forming values and preferences. All this together has an influence on motivation which, in its, turn, determined buying behavior. At the same time, it should be remembered that an important influential factor that impacts purchasing decisions is, as Hansen, Christensen and Lundsteen (2006) suggest, emotional memory (Hansen, Christensen, and Lundsteen 2006, 69). People have emotional memories for everything they experience and there also exist such memories in relation to brands. So, in order for a company to be continuously appealing to a consumer, the company’s brand must have positive image and reputation in the long run. One more way to appeal to people’s emotions is through gifts (Bagozzi, Gopinath, and Nyer 1999, 202). A consumer that will be rewarded for purchasing something is more likely to return to the same brands because appraisals lead to emotions. Through appraisals, customer satisfaction and emotions a company may ensure that the customer will return for the next purchase, will have word-of-mouth intentions, as well as other positive reactions to the brand (Nyer 1997, 302). In general, as Bagozzi (1997, 312) states, emotions “motivate action, qualify information processing, and in general regulate the pursuit of consumption goals.” Consequently, since emotions play an important role in customers’ decision-making process, it is very beneficial for companies to use emotions in the process of selling. In particular, the very first and most common way to appeal to emotions is through advertising. If a company wishes to use emotions for selling a product, then the product’s advertising should be telling a potential client how well he or she will feel after purchasing or using the product. Such ads may be associating the product with particular lifestyle, social position, or any other attribute that appeals to the target audience. The advertisement itself should not be focused on the product’s characteristics. The goal of the appealing to emotions advertisement is to make a consumer associate the product with his or her goals and desires. Pleasure, comfort, joy, happiness, superiority, exclusiveness – all these feelings may be used for this purpose. It should also be remembered that all the messages delivered to people regarding the product to be sold, should have a positive character. Since there exists emotional memory, companies should be continuously monitoring how their products are framed in the media. It is important to maintain positive reputation because image of the brand also has impact on emotions consumers experience in relation to that brand (Kwak, Kim, and Hirt 2011, 234). In addition, it can be recommended that priorities and values of the target audience are exmined and studied profoundly. This will help a company to design the most appealing to target audience’s emotions message. References Bagozzi, R. 1997. Goal-Directed Behaviors in Marketing: The Role of Emotion, Volition, and Motivation. Psychology & Marketing 14(July): 309-313. Bagozzi, R., M. Gopinath, and P. Nyer. 1999. The Role of Emotions in Marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 27(2): 184-206. Hansen, F., S. Christensen, and S. Lundsteen. 2006. Measuring Emotions in a Marketing Context. Innovative Marketing 2(2): 68-75. Kwak, D., Y. Kim, and E. Hirt. 2011. Exploring the Role of Emotions on Sport Consumers’ Behavioral and Cognitive Responses to Marketing Stimuli. European Sport Management Quarterly 11(3): 225-250. Nyer, P. 1997. A Study of the Relationships Between Cognitive Appraisals and Consumption Emotions. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 25(4): 296-304. Read More