Loyalty in Business to Business Context: A Study in Puchong, Malaysia

Heng Su Wan,P Yukthamarani Permarupan,Abdullah Al Mamun,Noor Raihani Binti Zainol

doi:10.5539/ijbm.v8n22p98

Abstract

Customer loyalty has been a focus of marketing as it is believed that higher level of customer loyalty may result in higher levels of repurchase. Numerous researches are carried out on the antecedents of customer loyalty in consumer market, but not many been discussed within business market and supply chain environment. This study aims to examine how product value, profitability, marketing support and perceived switching costs can influence customer behavioural loyalty in the business-to-business (B2B) context. By targeting small retailers as case market, tailored questionnaires were distributed to 150 business customers. The findings of this study suggests that customer behavioural loyalty towards supplier can be improved by focusing on increasing product value, enhancing profitability and building switching of costs.

Highlights

Over the past decades, marketers have been trying to improve loyalty for business-to-customer relationships, and this can be seen from developing of strategies and tools to keep customers coming back for more
The results of analyses support the expected relationships predicted in regression equation with the exceptions that the predicted positive effects of the supplier’s support on retailer behavioural loyalty which were not supported
Behavioural loyalty is indicated to be influenced by the switching costs and to a lower extent by the profitability of selling the supplier’s products and the value of products

Summary

Introduction

Marketers have been trying to improve loyalty for business-to-customer relationships, and this can be seen from developing of strategies and tools to keep customers coming back for more. The focus for business-to-business (B2B) relationship is apparently much less despite loyalty from a B2B customer means having thousands of end customers. The importance of customer loyalty B2B is more apparent than in B2C as business customers usually purchase larger volume of products and services. Researchers witnessed declining market share of organizations despite their achievement in getting high customer satisfaction score. The products that do not have good quality are still purchased by customer. This behaviour of customer lead to repurchase intention shows behavioural loyalty, yet antecedents of behavioural loyalty has not been given much attention. The lack of research on behavioural loyalty in business market provides an opportunity for extending the behavioural loyalty concept into business market, and widening its applicability to new market segments

Objectives

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Results

Conclusion