The Antecedents of Customer Loyalty in Malaysian Retail-Shopping Setting

Customer loyalty is gaining considerable interest from academics and business practitioners because both are interested in knowing the driving forces that enhance a company’s competitiveness. Despite the importance of customer loyalty, there is still a lack of comprehensive work to explore how customers develop loyalty to a particular retailing outlet, and how that loyalty can be maintained. The main objective of this study is to explore the antecedents of customer loyalty from both attitudinal and behavioral perspectives based on two underpinning theories. The underpinning theories are the Oliver’s Four-Stage Loyalty Model and the Mehrabian-Russell’s Environmental Psychology Model. The study setting is on retail-shopping in Malaysia, which focuses on the hypermarkets. The data is collected from a few hypermarkets within Klang Valley and Putrajaya. The instrument used in the study is a self-administered questionnaire. As for the statistical analysis, Structural Equation Modeling is used to test the hypotheses. The findings disclose that the antecedents of cognitive loyalty are the components of store image. They are service quality, product quality, product selection, store atmosphere, and promotion activity. The antecedents for affective loyalty are customer satisfaction, loyalty program, and retailer brand equity. The antecedent for conative loyalty is customer commitment. Likewise, the antecedent for action loyalty is conative loyalty. However, there are no mediating effects of emotional states on cognitive loyalty, affective loyalty, and conative loyalty. Thus, there are three strategic tools that dominate attitudinal aspect, namely, store image, loyalty program, and retailer brand equity. In addition, the findings of the study reveal that the relationships between the four stages in Oliver’s model of cognitive loyalty to affective loyalty, affective loyalty to conative loyalty, and conative loyalty to action loyalty are positive and significant. The study concludes that the Malaysian hypermarket’s customer loyalty level is evolving in stages. Hence, the establishment of attitude-behavior relationship has a great meaning to the retailers due to its predictive power, particularly in marketing strategy formulation.