Influence of customer physical resource on customer loyalty : A mediation study

Abstract

The notions of resource integration and value co-creation have become popular after the emergence of the Service-Dominant Logic. Several research investigations have been made to understand organizational resources and capabilities but research initiatives in the field of customer resources have been relatively scarce. Moreover, discussions on resource based capabilities have been mostly confined to strategic management and never explored with respect to marketing or consumer behaviour. This study by considering resource based capabilities as the exogenous variable and customer loyalty as the endogenous variable explores whether strategic resource capabilities have any implications in the domain of consumer behaviour. Based on Eric Arnould’s customer resource classification, this study investigates whether the higher order customer physical resource reflected through cognitive absorption, trust propensity and perceived self-efficacy can mediate between online grocers’ resource based capability and the customers’ store loyalty. The study was conducted in the Bengaluru city of India using snowball sampling technique and the data were analysed using PLS SEM. The result suggests that customer physical resource does mediate between online grocery store’s resource based capability and store loyalty. This research initiative has brought forth an altogether new perspective in understanding customer loyalty. Loyalty does not only depend on the value which is delivered by the firms but it is also influenced by the level of resource contributed by the customers’ themselves during the shopping process. Also, this study for the first time has demonstrated that cognitive absorption, trust, propensity and perceived self efficacy can be the manifestations of personal resource which is a contribution to the extant literature.