Customer loyalty plays a crucial role in firms performance. Over the last three decades the antecedents of customer loyalty in the service sector have attracted great interest by academics and practitioners alike. This study has two key objectives. First, we investigate how image perceptions, service quality and customer satisfaction contribute to customer loyalty. The results show that the organizational image customers hold of the service provider and perceived service quality have a similarly strong relationship with customer loyalty. Moreover, both, service quality and organizational image are significantly and positively correlated with customer satisfaction. The findings highlight that it is in particular through the formation of customer satisfaction that service quality and organizational impact customer loyalty. Thus, we can demonstrate that customer satisfaction has a mediating effect between external and interactive marketing initiatives and the development of customer loyalty. Second, we investigate the role of switching costs in the development of customer loyalty. The findings indicate that perceived switching costs, here assessed in terms of price sensitivity, have by far the strongest, positive and direct impact on customer loyalty in comparison to the other antecedents included in the model. The importance of switching costs is further corroborated with the finding that switching costs moderate the link between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

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Purpose This paper aims to provide a social network site influence (SNSI) profile of early adopters. This study explores the relationship between personality traits of early adopters of social network sites (SNS), their propensity to share information and rumors and their general SNSI. Design/methodology/approach An online survey was sent to the first users of Twitter (n = 200) and Google+ (n = 130) to assess their personality traits. Answers of each respondent were matched to their SNSI scores from Klout and PeerIndex, the industry standard for measuring SNSI. Findings Early adopters of SNS, in comparison to market mavens, are more likely to exert influence on one particular topic related to their profession: technology and the internet. Their levels of extraversion, openness and conscientiousness have a positive and significant impact on information sharing, and a negative impact on rumor sharing. Both, information sharing and rumor sharing have a positive and significant impact on the general SNSI of early adopters. Originality/value Firms struggle to decide whether to invest early in the life of newly created SNS as they are unsure about the characteristics of early adopters of such networks, and, more importantly, whether these sites are effective initial vectors for word-of-mouth. The findings demonstrate that early adopters’ influence (SNSI score) is on par with that of the rest of SNS users, suggesting their influence may be somewhat limited. The study also shows that the opinion leadership impact of the more influential early adopters is monomorphic in nature, being mainly confined to the related technology and internet domains.

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