The Effects of Customer’s Psychological Ownership on Intention to Establish Long-Term Relationships with the Company

Hyeon-Sook Shim

doi:10.22158/jbtp.v8n1p19

Abstract

Purpose: It is very important for companies to maintain long-term relationship with their customers. This study focused on the psychological ownership of customers to improve and make strong relationship with the company. This study aimed to find out the main antecedents that form psychological ownership. It also conceptually examine whether psychological ownership affects the intention to sustain long-term relationship with companies.Methodology: This study will conduct a comparative study between the US and Korea by surveying customers using hotels and department stores. The results of survey will be analyzed by structural equation model using AMOS program.Findings: Through previous studies and inferences, we extracted customer participation, customer experience, and customer-company identification as the main antecedents influencing psychological ownership in the customer-company relationship. Discussion: If it is verified that psychological ownership has a significant impact on long-term relationship, marketing practices could be suggested that can maximize the psychological ownership of customers by analyzing three factors of customer participation and four types of customer experience.

Highlights

The ultimate goal of a company is to build and maintain long-term relationships with its customers
Rao and Perry (2002) report that long-term relationship exchanges are often based on social cohesion, that is, investments in time and effort to create positive human relations between partners
Furby (1978) and Rudmin and Berry (1987) report that people experience feelings of a sense of ownership for targets to which their skills or knowledge was applied. This can be regarded to correspond to “when you become to control a certain target’ according to the classification” by Pierce et al (2001), and informational input, which means cognitive effort such as providing information to a certain target when seen based on the classification of participation to form psychological ownership by Rodie and Klein (2000)