고객등급의 하향조정이 소비자 반응에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구

Abstract

In a competitive market situation, most of companies try to find ways to differentiate themselves from their competitors. One of the strategies that strengthen their relationships with customers which should lead to an increase in consumer's loyalty is the use of loyalty programs. The existing research concerning loyalty program has mainly focused on positive effects. However, some researchers have doubted those effects due to the excessive costs of loyalty programs. Accordingly, within the last years, the phenomenon for negative effect which is formed by loyalty programs designed incorrectly has a negative effect on firm performance is one of the most important issues. Hierarchical loyalty programs are “award preferred customer status, providing exclusive benefits to consumers who have exceeded a certain spending level(Wagner, Hennig-Thurau & Rudolph, 2009). In order to remain in this preferred status, customers must maintain a required level of spending otherwise they will be demoted and lose their preferred status. Wagner, Hennig-Thurau & Rudolph (2009) analyzed that customer demotion jeopardizes customer loyalty intentions due to an increased level of negative affect and a decrease in perceived benefits. However, it is not enough to explain a concrete psychological mechanism to deeper understand customers' responses to status degradations. The existing literature for psychological structure on customer demotion is limited, but of high importance for marketers and academics. The objective of this study is, thus, to extend existing psychological mechanisms in this study to specify the concept of customer demotion. Also, it is to elicit demotional dissonance, cognition and affect as key factors consisting the psychological mechanism and confirm how variance of demotional dissonance explained by cognition and affect increases as sunk cost over time. And, on the basis of sunk cost effect, this study is to unreveal nonlinear relationship between demotional dissonance and loyalty intention and moderating effect of substitutability. For the experiment, a 2(credit card/airline) x 2(sunk-cost situation/no sunk-cost situation) x 2(substitutability/no substitutability) between-subjects design is consisted to measure these relationships. It is important to set up a research design which offers the possibility to compare causality between variables depending on sunk-cost and substitutability under customer demotion. Therefore, eight scenarios were used in the questionnaire to test for the differences which vary on the factors. For the credit card industry, data were collected from 450 university students in Busan. And, for the airline industry, 400 respondents were collected by practitioners in various fields. Totally among 850 respondents, 594 were used for the analysis. The results of this study are as followings; First, demotional dissonance was found to be a key factor as psychological mechanism from qualitative research, with the influencing roles of cognitive and affect on demotional dissonance. Second, the results showed that cognition and affect explain the variance of demotional dissonance depending on whether sunk cost situation is presented or not over time. After customers recognize their sunk-cost over time, cognitive and affect factors simultaneously influence demotional dissonance. More important, as perceived sunk-cost increases over time, the influence of cognition increase, whereas the influence of affect decrease. In this context, it was found that affect factor has its strongest role in the early stages. The cognitive factor maintains and increases its role over time. Third, it was confirmed that the nonlinear relationship between demotional dissonance and loyalty intention under sunk cost situation over time. The differential roles of cognition and affect as sunk cost over time are the main reason to explain above nonlinear relationship. Under sunk cost situation, demotional dissonance increases because cognitive factor becomes more prominent. However, customer try to more decrease demotional dissonance formed by cognition than affect to dispel psychological conflict, unrest, and worries. Fourth, to examine moderating roles of substitutability on the nonlinear relationship between demotional dissonance and loyalty intention, quantitle regression was used. The result showed that, for customer who perceived sunk-cost over time, demotional dissonance had a stronger impact on loyalty intention in the presence of substitutability than no substitutability. This research delivers implications for marketers and managers which helps them to better understand consumer behavior after a demotion. As mentioned previously, it is well recognized that both cognition and affect have important influences on the demotional dissonance. The most valuable findings of this research are to provide the theoretical and empirical explanations that sunk cost influences a dynamic setting of cognition and affect simultaneously, and the nonlinear relationship is established to understand the relation between demotional dissonance and loyalty intention. Research findings will not only contribute to the existing literature on the proposed topic by giving theoretical contributions for academics but also by offering practical implications for companies to better understand their customers and to better deal with different customer reactions. Situational factor such as sunk cost and substitutability showed moderating effects in the research at hand, thus, leading to the conclusion that all customers behave similarly when getting demoted, namely show a decrease in loyalty intentions, these results do not always constitute. This information is valuable for companies as it shows that segmenting customers into different groups is necessary in this case. This knowledge can ease companies' issues with dealing with their large amounts of customers.