Building Customer Loyalty - Essay Example

The latter trend has borne business ventures’ interest in fostering consumer loyalty, which is synonymous with consumer adherence to an establishment’s products and services, as opposed to shifting to alternative suppliers. Further, adoption of consumer loyalty has seen firms shift from the traditional marketing model that primarily targeted broadening of their consumer bases and enhancing profitability through increased sales volumes, toward marketing for loyalty. The widespread inclination is evident from the increasing number of companies that are opting to formulate, implement, assess and improve loyalty strategies or programs meant to develop stable relations with customers.

This paper seeks to provide insight into how the three commitment component model can be used to formulate loyalty programs and consequently foster consumers’ loyalty to a family-run Thai restaurant based in London. Customer loyalty will enable the Thai restaurant to attain higher efficiency by streamlining operation strategies, providing customers’ with favorite meals or services, and incurring lower expenditure while using three commitment component model-based programs. Conventionally, firms utilized a loyalty strategy that sought to attract numerous customers but not to retain them in the long run.

An excellent example of a traditional loyalty model is the behavioral approach, whereby firms take advantage of customers’ buying propensities to build a loyalty program. This translates to the creation of slow point redemption of points or rewards by a customer after they use the establishment’s products or services for a while. Contrastingly, the three commitment component model encompasses three principal loyalty elements, that is, the affective, normative, and continuance. The affective aspect represents elements that bind consumers willingly to a service provider. The normative constituent of this loyalty model binds a customer to a service provider owing to perceived obligation, while the last continuance aspect ties customers to services providers through necessity. As can be discerned from their distinctive definitions, the three commitment component model is more comprehensive in nature than its traditional counterpart.