Vartotojų lojalumą mažmeninės prekybos tinklams lemiančių veiksnių modeliavimas COVID-19 pandemijos akivaizdoje

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on individuals and businesses around the world. Due to drops in aggregate supply and demand, and changes in consumer purchasing behaviour companies have been forced to look for new growth strategies. One of the factors to focus on in this situation is consumer loyalty. Loyal consumers are especially important for companies’ growth, but in order to create their base, factors influencing consumer loyalty needed to be identified. Therefore, based on theory analysis, the theoretic consumer loyalty model was constructed. In order to check this model, the problem raised in this article was: how to model the determinants of consumer loyalty. This problem was analysed in the context of the supermarket chains in Lithuania during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, this article aimed to model the determinants of consumer loyalty toward the supermarket chains during the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to achieve this aim, expert interviews and questionnaire survey were conducted. The analysis of research results revealed that during the COVID-19 pandemic consumer loyalty toward the supermarket chains in Lithuania was impacted by perceived value, hedonistic value, consumer trust, consumer satisfaction, organization/brand image and service quality, but mainly by the last three of these determinants.