Creating and maintaining customer loyalty has become a strategic mandate in today's service markets. Recent research suggests that customers differ in their value to a firm, and therefore customer retention and loyalty-building efforts should not necessarily be targeted to all customers of a firm. Given these sentiments, it is becoming increasingly necessary for firms to have a thorough understanding of their customer base. Yet current knowledge is limited in providing insights to firms regarding the differences within their customer base. This research comprises two studies in which the authors examine the differences among internal customer groups in a service industry. As theory suggests and as is empirically validated here, customers who have switched service providers because of dissatisfaction seem to differ significantly from other customer groups in their satisfaction and loyalty behaviors. The findings offer some interesting implications for both marketing theory and practice.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The continuous interaction between retailers and their consumers has fascinated researchers for more than 50 years and has spurred the development of many measurement instruments. While a number of shopper typologies have been proposed, these studies have tended to employ dissimilar measures, samples and retail formats. As a result, the comparability and generalizability of findings are problematic. Using a multi-method, multi-format approach, this study replicates and extends past research findings to provide a comparable and generalizable typology of shoppers. Based on responses from nearly three thousand shoppers, the current study identifies the existence of five shopper sub-groups across multiple retail formats.