Investigating the antecedents and outcome of commitment in a business-to-consumer service environment

Abstract

Loyalty has been widely acknowledged as a critical component in long-term relationship-building with customers (Affran, Dza & Buckman 2019; Jo & Mo 2018). Marketing scholars like Alam, Karim and Habiba (2021) and Omoregie et al. (2019) have claimed that the future loyalty intention of customers will increasingly depend on their level of commitment. As a result, enhanced knowledge of the multidimensional nature of commitment and its potential influence on the attitudinal and behavioural loyalty of customers is important in highly competitive environments (Boonlertvanich 2019). According to Wu, Cheng and Hussein (2019), loyalty encompasses the preparedness to repurchase a product or service continuously in the future. This results in the ongoing purchase of similar products or services from the brand, although competitors are offering better value offerings that could stimulate the willingness to switch. Over the past two decades, a new school of thought has emerged that requires investigation into the multidimensional nature of commitment on loyalty. An understanding of the multidimensional nature of commitment is important to strengthen the commitment–loyalty link (Khan et al. 2020). Park and Kim (2018) and Tabrani, Amin and Nizam (2018) argued in favour of understanding commitment from a multidimensional perspective, as it can assist banks in better understanding their customers’ commitment needs. Fatima et al. (2020) and Hwang, Baloglu and Tanford (2019) agreed with this, stating that customers’ future loyalty intentions are guided by their affective and calculative Orientation: Over the past two decades, a new school of thought has emerged that requires investigation into the multidimensional nature of commitment on loyalty.