Future Loyalty of Customers - Essay Example

The paper "Future Loyalty of Customers " is a great example of a marketing essay. In positivistic paradigm research which was employed in this article, the researchers generally started from some theoretical position arguing for how a set of hypothetical constructs should relate to each other and deduce some specific hypotheses to test. Those hypotheses generally implicate certain constructs as being related in a particular way. The hypotheses that were proposed in this article were there the center of this research. Since these hypotheses usually implicate certain constructs as being related in a particular way. The article portrays a weakness in the way these hypotheses were tested since each construct was not substantially translated into a concrete series of steps that would be undertaken to quantify it.

In addition, the translation process which is generally called operational definition whereby a construct is defined by the operations a researcher goes through to attach numbers to the phenomenon being observed or measured was well covered in this article. The findings obtained from the previous research complemented the present findings.

Three survey interviews were assembled to obtain customers' responses to a standard set of questions and rating scales. Interviewers asked shoppers such questions as to what motivates their decisions to switch and if they were satisfied with the services of their current providers. In my opinion, the research questions were too general and since the respondent had different knowledge levels in regard to the research questions. The interviewers also did not record some basic demographic details such as gender and age and the impact these details could have on the switching behaviors of the customers.

One positive thing in the way this research was conducted is that the interview protocol and questions proposed to test the hypotheses were pilots - tested on a small sample of customers who were drawn from the Swedish telecommunication service industry. Furthermore, one of the easiest ways to conceptualize reliability is with respect to stability over time (Cooksey& McDonald, 2011). The interviews in this article were conducted annually and the researchers were able to obtain the same measurements especially in terms of the quantified amount of the same constructor characteristic on the same sample of people at two distinct points in time, then we are justified in saying the findings of this research reliable.

The research in this article was conducted in a social setting. According to the theoretical perspective concerning social and behavioral measurement, data collection errors are expected errors to be larger than with physical measurements because many of the phenomena we measure are inherently unobservable except as indirect indications via behaviors or responses to specific items or questions. However, even with the expectation of larger errors, the researchers in this article still valued and preferred those measurement processes that produce more consistent reflections of a constructor characteristic over time and conditions to those measurements that do not.

In conclusion, the major findings of the research conducted in this article indicate that the future loyalty of customers does not always seem to be an issue of expressed attributes but rather two major factors often enhance the stability of the customer relations. These factors are sensitivity which incorporates triggers and passive or active customers and argumentation (Ganesh, Arnold, & Reynolds, 2000). These findings are satisfactory since data collected at different times were used to reach a common outcome.