Loyalty Effect of the Tesco Club Card Toward its Members - Essay Example

There is always a reason for customer loyalty, it is believed, which behavior differs from the one purchase to the next, and are not accidental (Ibid.).
Morgan et al. (2000), however, makes distinctions between customer loyalty and customer retention. Accordingly, whereas the former usually involves both behavioral and attitudinal dimensions, the latter is purely behavioral. The marketer factor is also much considered in customer retention while with customer loyalty, the intrapersonal part of customer behavior is the point of consideration. Moreover, many other reasons were found to prod customers to buy outside of loyalty, for example during sudden change of prices, or when there is a risk involved, or because there is no other choice (www.bestofbiz.co.uk, cited in Morgan et al., 2000). In cases where there is competition among marketers, alternatives made available to customers may make them ex-customers if they fall short of loyalty (Morgan et al., 2000).
There are two approaches to defining and measuring customer loyalty as gleaned from the literature. Rundle-Thiele and Bennett (2001) describe the stochastic approach as considering the concept in behavioral terms, with the deterministic approach considering it in attitudinal terms. “Stochastic” is defined as having a pattern that can be analyzed statistically but not predicted precisely (Reader’s Digest Great Dictionary of the English Language, 2001), while “deterministic” has something to do with the doctrine that all events and actions are determined by external forces acting on the will (Ibid).
Between these two approaches, there appears little disagreement contrary to the aspect of measuring it (Rundle-Thiele and Bennett (2001). Some 30 years ago Jacoby and Kyner were said to have started the debate which is still going on up to the present time. The drawbacks of the stochastic approach are presented by O’Malley (1998) and Odin (2001).
The rather narrow technical definitions of the stochastic approach “does not capture the full richness and depth of the loyalty construct,” according to O’Malley (1998) For instance, it does not indicate if repeat orders come about out of habit, or due to situations obtaining, or to psychological reasons on the part of the customer. Instead of a 100 percent loyalty to a single brand, according to O’Malley (1998) which may characterize only a few, customers tend to select from two or three brands within any product category, which have become their regular fare.