Abstract:

With the increasing concern for customer satisfaction, loyalty has come increasingly into focus in marketing planning and marketing strategy. This also applies to retailing. However, as the present paper will show, in a retailing context, loyalty is a complex phenomenon. This is particularly ascribable to the very complex manner in which consumers combine stores on different shopping trips with different purposes and for different kinds of products. Obviously how consumers evaluate the goods offered in a particular store has major influence upon their store choice, store loyalty and store preferences. With data from a study particularly looking into this issue it is shown how people with different “preferred stores”, look differently upon the quality of the various assortment components of the stores.