Jesús Gutiérrez Cillán

The role of loyalty programs in behavioral and affective loyalty

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to analyze the behavioral and affective loyalty of retailer customers in order to establish the role played by loyalty programs in the development of these variables.Design/methodology/approach – Research data were taken from a survey carried out on 750 customers from a Spanish supermarket chain. Several ANOVAs are employed to compare the two loyalty dimensions among participants and non participants in loyalty programs.Findings – The results show that participants in loyalty programs are more behavioral and affectively loyal than non participants. Nevertheless, most customers do not change purchase behavior after joining a loyalty program. The strategy is therefore to retain loyal customers and to achieve the reinforcement of affective bonds linking the customer to the retailer.Practical implications – Companies should focus their efforts on developing a reward plan as adapted as possible to concrete needs of each participant in the program to achieve true loyalty.Origi...

The interaction of dependence and trust in long‐term industrial relationships

It has been noted in the literature on inter‐organisational relationships that long‐term cooperation is more effective in a business environment characterised by interdependence, commitment and trust. However, there is not enough knowledge about the effect of interdependence in different trust contexts. This paper draws on several theoretical contributions to examine the interaction of economic and social factors as determinants of industrial buyer‐seller relationships. In order to test the proposed hypotheses information was collected relating to supplier‐manufacturer relationships in the automotive industry. As expected, the empirical results indicate that trust moderates the effect of interdependence on the relational orientation of the exchange in that it enhances the relational orientation perceived by both manufacturer and supplier. A discrepancy was also found between suppliers’ and manufacturers’ relationship perceptions. The theoretical and managerial implications of the results are also discussed.

Designing effective websites: The moderating role of user internet experience

ABSTRACT The objective of this study was to analyze the effectiveness of various aspects relating to execution of a Website: Presentation format, quantity and type of content. We developed experimental Websites and we found that in high-involvement context this effectiveness is not influenced as much by the format of presentation of the Website as by the quantity and type of content offered. The extension of the Website content generates more favorable, affective and behavioral responses only when such extension has an informative nature. Moreover, we found evidence of the moderating role of the individuals Web experience in the advertising persuasion process. Therefore, the results of this investigation can provide recommendations to the organizations on how to create effective Websites.

Determinants of the Level Participation and Influence in the Buying Center: An Analysis for Spanish Industrial Companies

The aim of this paper is to analyze the industrial buying behavior in order not only to improve the knowledge of buying industrial process carried by the organizations but also to identify the factors behind the level of participation in the buying decisions and the factors related with the degree of influence among the members of the buying center. Thus, we perform a survey of previous work on the relation between the variations of participation and the influence of the buying group, and the characteristics of purchase situation, the individuals and the organizational structure. Among conditions of purchase situation we consider those which most often appear in the prior research: novelty, product complexity, buying situation complexity, buying importance, time pressure and perceived risk associated to the purchase. With respect to individual characteristics, we include the personal stake and degree of experience. Finally, we consider the set of variables which characterize the companys organizational structure: work division, degree of formality of relations, decision-making centralization, standardization and configuration, as internal or anatomic structures, and size or dimension as factors of the specific environment. Furthermore, we test their explanatory power for a sample of Spanish industrial firms. LISREL statistical package is the tool used to verify the hypothesis proposed on the paper.