Determination of customer loyalty stages

Abstract

One of the most important trends of recent marketing development is the orientation’s alteration form transaction-based marketing to relationship marketing. Organizations tend to choose the relationship marketing orientation, which is based on attracting and retaining loyal customers, instead of traditional marketing orientation based on marketing mix. Customer loyalty is becoming one of the fundamental goals for the main part of organizations. Consequently, their attention to customer retaining is growing enormously. The states of loyalty vary among consumers. In other words, some buyers are more loyal than the others. The different state of customer loyalty can be explained by the existence of customer loyalty stages. Customer loyalty can be named as a process, which consists of four stages. The process means that people grow into loyal customers by stages. The process is accomplished over time; customers on each stage are different in their attitudes and behaviour related to an organization. All customers can be attached to a particular loyalty stage, according to their attitudinal and behavioural characteristics. Four stages of customer loyalty can be distinguished: (1) “Neutral customer”, (2) “Potentially loyal customer”, (3) “Unconsciously loyal customer”, and (4) “Genuinely loyal customer”. In every stage customers have different needs, which have to be recognized and satisfied by an organization in order to gain competitive advantage in the market. Therefore, the determination of its customer loyalty stage is vital for every organization. [...]