Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2006. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on August 10, 2007) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2007. / Title from file title page. James Boles, committee chair; Wesley Johnston, Greg W. Marshall, Edward Rigdon, Danny Bellenger, committee members. Electronic text (222 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 29, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 217-221).

Outline

Thesis ( Ph.D.)(consumer Science)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Summary in English. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2007. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1994. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 34-36).

The context of this study is Bangladesh`s food retailing sector. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) and customer retention. Since Independence in 1971, Bangladesh has made solid progress and made substantial improvements in its economy, with GDP growth of 5-6% consistently over the past decade. With the real economic growth coupled with rapid urbanisation, the country has witnessed a new form of organised retailing that started to emerge in early 2000. This organised retail format is undergoing a period of unprecedented expansion, something that is driving additional demand and as well as creating opportunities for further enterprise. There are clear signs of substantial and potential growth in future. The economic growth coupled with the growth of urbanisation, changes in demographic factors, increases in employment and income levels has had a profound influence on consumers shopping behaviour and hence, Customer Relationship Marketing. The core aim of Relationship Marketing is to build a long lasting mutually bonded relationships with customers and various other important stakeholders. The concept has attracted considerable attention among scholars in recent decades and has appeared in service marketing literature as a new marketing paradigm. The concept is considered to be critical to the success of any organisation as it has been an accepted phenomenon that maintains that existing customers are far easier to retain than is the process of acquiring new customers. In order to stay in business and cope with the challenging business dynamism, organisations are continuously searching for reliable and serviceable strategies to be employed in order to increase customer retention. However, there is a lack of an accepted level of consensus among researchers on the core antecedents of relationship marketing that can be used to achieve the above aims, especially while the concept is new in the context of organised retailing sectors in Bangladesh. In response, this thesis developed a conceptual framework of customer retention strategy to conduct an empirical investigation in one holistic model: (i) the relationships between relationship quality and customer retention; (ii) how bonds influences the relationship quality? As well as (iii) the effect of CRM on customer loyalty and retention. The model incorporates bonds, service quality and components of relational quality (Trust, commitment and satisfaction) into one relationship model to show the relationship between these five constructs and customer loyalty and finally the independent variable of customer retention. The model establishes eleven hypotheses to understand the relationships between various constructs. Furthermore, in order to understand the intensity of grocery food consumers loyalty, Oliver`s Four Stages loyalty model was used. A sample of 202 grocery food retail customers were selected in a random sample from four selected superstores located in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Data were collected via mail questionnaires. The questionnaires content validity was tested by conducting a pre-test of 50 households before conducting the final survey. The results support hypothesized relationships built on the model. Correlation analysis indicates that all the coefficient correlate significantly except commitment that shows the least strengths of the correlation coefficient. Nevertheless, correlations were statistically significant. Therefore, all eleven hypotheses are confirmed to some degree. The findings indicate that service quality, trust, bond and customer satisfactions are vital for creating positive customer loyalty which in turn creates customer retention. In regards to the intensity of four types of loyalty (cognitive, affective, co-native and action) results indicate that the intensity of cognitive loyalty was higher than affective loyalty, co-native and action loyalty. Co-native loyalty is also higher than action loyalty. This thesis provides evidence for the first time in Bangladesh of various linkages between bonds, service quality, relationship quality, loyalty and retention and hence, contributes to both theoretical and practical knowledge. The findings suggest that by employing adequate service quality provisions and bonds it is possible to enhance and build quality relationships between parties.

abstract: Understanding the customer experience, which requires a thorough knowledge of all touchpoints that can result from the way that a product is marketed, sold, and used has recently been identified as a research priority by the Marketing Science Institute. Although recent research has examined some aspects of the customer experience, research has yet to examine the way in which the full spectrum of touchpoint experiences may drive particular marketing performance metrics. Significant challenges to this line of research are the complex network of relationships that competing firms have forged with channel partners, the relationships that focal customers have with other customers in social networks and user communities, and the relationships that customers have with the brand and with channel partners. To address these challenges, this paper examined the customer experience and its effects on loyalty and commitment through three research projects conducted in the consumer aviation market. The first and second studies examined these touchpoint experiences using archival data supplied by an avionics manufacturer. Results from these studies showed the importance of the customer experience in accounting for customer loyalty. The final study examined the role of identity in shaping the customer experience among aircraft owners through a series of depth interviews. Results from these interviews illustrated the importance of identity in shaping the customer experience, and provided insights into how individuals attempt to use their consumption experiences to reinforce a sense of identity / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Business Administration 2011

Today’s turbulent business environment has made external knowledge a dominant source of information in firms’ attempt to develop and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. Firms need to share and acquire new knowledge as they seek to develop new applications and to survive. Therefore, whether inter-firm information sharing has a direct effect on firm performance has become a central question in studies on strategic management and supply chain management. However, the empirical results remain largely divergent and inconclusive, ranging from a positive relationship to a negative relationship. This study advanced the literature by examining the mediating role of ordinary capabilities (manifested by operations capabilities) in the relationship between information sharing and firm performance. By drawing on the dynamic capabilities perspective, we propose that information sharing, as a dynamic capability, deploys and reconfigures the existing operations capabilities, which in turn lead to superior firm performance. Furthermore, we used a dimensional approach to look at how the two types of information sharing, focal manufacturer-key suppliers (MS) information sharing and focal manufacturer-key buyers (MB) information sharing, may affect both ordinary capabilities and firm performance. Moreover, this study investigated how a firm’s market orientation moderates the information sharing-operations capabilities link. We argue that market orientation positively strengthens the effects of both MS information sharing and MB information sharing on operations capabilities by driving a continuous and proactive disposition to meeting customer needs. We randomly chose as our sample manufacturing firms from the official list provided by the provincial Association of Entrepreneurs in the Ning Xia autonomous region of China. The data collection was performed over a two-month period and 154 cases were considered valid for our study. Multiple regression and bootstrapping methods were used to test our model. Most of the key hypotheses have been supported. First, operations capabilities fully mediate the relationships between both types of information sharing and performance. Moreover, the three dimensions of market orientation (i.e., market intelligence generation, dissemination, and responsiveness) positively moderate the effects of both MS and MB information sharing on operations capabilities, except for the moderating effect of market intelligence generation in the relationship between MB information sharing and operations capabilities. Several implications, both theoretical and practical, are envisaged. First, our findings, which reveal that operations capabilities fully mediate the effects of information sharing on firm performance, contribute to unpacking the black box of information sharing and performance relationship in the buyer-supplier relationship context. The study offers an alternative explanation for the inconclusive empirical results regarding the relationship between information sharing and firm performance. We propose and verify a theoretical claim suggesting that information sharing is a necessary but insufficient condition to improve firm performance, and operations capabilities that are extended, modified, changed, and/or created by using information sharing determine the firm’s market position, which in turn transforms the potential benefits of information sharing into superior firm performance. Second, our study goes one step beyond existing studies on the interactive effects of marketing capabilities and marketing orientation on firm performance. We demonstrate that it is the interactive effects of dynamic capabilities (information sharing) and market orientation on the development of ordinary capabilities (operations capabilities) that really matter to a firm’s sustained performance supremacy in the long term. The practical implication is that managers must ensure that their firms have ongoing inter-firm information sharing arrangements with their suppliers and buyers. At the same time, they should have good operations capabilities to take advantage of the shared information and transform the benefits into superior firm performance. Another practical implication is that manufacturers need a corporate culture of market orientation to maximize the positive effects of both MS and MB inter-firm information sharing on the development of operations capabilities since at the end of the day it is operations capabilities that contribute directly to the supremacy of a firm’s performance. Keywords: Information Sharing; Dynamic Capabilities; Ordinary Capabilities; Market Orientation

Bakgrund I takt med en ökad digitalisering sker handel idag inte endast i fysiska butiker. Fler och fler klädföretag använder idag e-handel som försäljningskanal för att sälja sina produkter, samtidigt som efterfrågan från konsumenter är i ständig förändring. Trycket på att tillgodose kundernas behov och skapa kundnöjdhet sätter press på företagsledningar att använda flera kanaler, känt som multikanalförsäljning. Som följd har begreppet multichannel customer management vuxit fram som lyfter vikten av att utvärdera sina kanaler för att i sin tur kunna allokera resurser till respektive kanal. Syfte Syftet med studien är att inom klädbranschen undersöka hur ett antal nyckelfaktorer påverkar kundnöjdheten inom fysiska försäljningskanaler respektive e-handelskanaler. Vidare ämnar studien förklara vilka av nyckelfaktorerna företag för respektive försäljningskanal bör fokusera på i syfte att uppnå kundnöjdhet och i sin tur kundlojalitet. Genomförande Med ett realistiskt perspektiv, en deduktiv ansats och en kvantitativ metod har 8 hypoteser tagits fram utifrån befintlig forskning. Den empiriska undersökningen bestod av en enkät som delades ut på Linköpings universitet och besvarades av 224 studenter inom Generation Y. Vidare användes programmet SPSS för att genomföra en statistisk analys av insamlad primärdata. Slutsats För att uppnå kundnöjdhet och i sin tur kundlojalitet visar studiens resultat att företag, för sin fysiska försäljningskanal, bör fokusera på faktorerna service, tillgänglighet, tid och säkerhet. Studiens resultat visar även att företag för sin e-handelskanal bör fokusera på produktgaranti, tid och säkerhet för att uppnå kundnöjdhet och kundlojalitet. / Background: Companies today are, due to an increased digitization, forced to use more than traditional stores to reach out to their customers. More and more retailers are now using online stores to meet an even broader market and to attain customer satisfaction. Using more than one channel has become known as multichannel retailing, from which a concept known as multichannel customer management has started to grow. The concept says that as the number of channels used increase, companies need to evaluate their channels in order to allocate resources to each one. Purpose: The purpose with the study is to examine how a couple of key factors, in the apparel industry, affect customer satisfaction in traditional and online channels. The study aims to explain which one of these factors each channel should focus on to achieve customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Completion: With a realistic perspective, deductive approach and quantitative method 8 hypothesis have been tested. The empirical study was conducted by handing out a survey on Linköping University and in total 224 respondents within Generation Y answered. To analyze the collected data, the statistical software SPSS was used. Conclusion: In order to accomplish customer satisfaction and customer loyalty the study shows that companies, for their traditional stores, should focus on service, accessibility, time and safety. The results of the study shows that companies, for their online stores, should focus on product guarantee, time and safety.