Attitudinal and behavioural loyalty in a retailing context: some preliminary results

The theoretical and empirical perspectives suggested in this work are focused on loyalty construct, its dimensions and determinants. Indeed, numerous previous studies on brand-consumer relationship have been focused on loyalty concept, investigating its attitudinal and behavioural components. Customer satisfaction has been identified as a key determinant of loyalty, even though not the only one. In these studies, satisfaction is supposed to be able to preserve relationships with customers and, consequently, to improve loyalty. This kind of studies, however, has hardly ever been referred to the theoretical background suggested by relational marketing. The relational marketing contribution is generally embedded in industrial vertical connections (BtoB). On the contrary this work aims to identify and analyse the relational loyalty components in retailer-consumer dyad. In particular, the study aims to obtain two objectives: the first one is to empirically demonstrate the multidimensional nature of loyalty construct; the second one is to investigate the causal relationship between psychological and behavioural loyalty dimensions.