Concept and Importance of Repatronage Decisions

Abstract

Conceptualizations of brand loyalty go back to the late sixties, when George Day (1969) argued that brand loyalty should be evaluated with both attitudinal and behavioral criteria. Years later, Jacoby & Chestnut (1978) carved a multidimensional brand loyalty definition, also including attitudinal and behavioral components. These authors have explored in their definition “… the psychological meaning of brand loyalty in an effort to distinguish it from behavioral definitions” (Oliver 1999, p. 35). The behavioral component of brand loyalty is captured by customers’ actual purchase behavior, whereas the attitudinal component of brand loyalty is captured by evidence of customers’ relative brand preference and/or attachment to brand attributes (Day 1969). Even though brand loyalty has been defined long ago, it has been measured in early marketing studies as repeat purchase or repeat purchase intentions (Ganesan 1994). Moreover, current discussions about how to measure brand loyalty, its antecedents and behavioral consequences, show that the conceptualization of brand loyalty is not a fully exhausted topic. In a recent Marketing News article, Neal (2000) reopens the debate about issues related to the operationalization of the loyalty construct by stating that “Loyalty is behavior”. Even considering that researchers do not agree with Neal’s (2000) behavioral only loyalty definition, there is still considerable disagreement on how to operationalize the attitudinal component of brand loyalty (Grisaffe 2001).