Customer disloyalty: an interactive introspection

Abstract

Contemporary marketing thought and practice of customer loyalty seem to like happy endings. A considerable amount of literature has been published on customer loyalty with most of these studies examining how to build loyalty. However, much less is known about how loyalty weakens and terminates. In this chapter, we explore the idea of customer disloyalty. We use this term to refer to the situations when customers stop or reduce their repeat purchase behaviour and/or decrease their psychological commitment to a brand, product, service, or idea. To investigate customer disloyalty, we use interactive introspection which included authors writing reflective journals and interviewing each other about their described experiences. Such approach intentionally diverts from well-trodden path of using quantitative approaches to explore customer loyalty. Our findings, providing insights into the non-monolithic nature of customer disloyalty, demonstrate the insightfulness of using interactive introspection to better understand customer (dis)loyalty from the view of both customers and marketing academics. Besides providing ideas for future research, this chapter facilitates the use of interactive introspection by describing the procedures involved in conducting this under-used but theoretically and practically valuable approach.