This study aims to extend research in marketing on two important relational constructs, customer satisfaction and brand attachment, by comparing their long-term effects on customer behaviors with different levels of performance difficulty in a relatively understudied domain of durable products.
Using a two-stage quantitative study with US customers from five durable product categories, the authors first explored the hierarchy of customers’ loyalty behaviors based on increasing effort in a pretest study (N = 675). Then, the authors tested the effectiveness of satisfaction and brand attachment for customers’ loyalty behaviors over a nine-month period in a longitudinal study (N = 2,284) with customers from the same product categories.
Compared to satisfaction, brand attachment emerges as a stronger long-term predictor of customer behaviors. The performance difficulty of customer behaviors positively moderates the impact of brand attachment and negatively moderates the impact of customer satisfaction. Brand attachment is particularly effective in predicting difficult-to-perform customer behaviors, which require customers to expend resources such as time and money. Customer satisfaction is mainly effective for predicting easy-to-perform behaviors, but its long-term impact is significantly lower for easy-to-perform behaviors than brand attachment.
The use of consumer durables in the study and samples from only one country restricts the generalizability of the findings.
The complementary roles of customer satisfaction and brand attachment are highlighted. Only satisfying customers is not enough to engage customers in behaviors that require resources such as money, time and energy for the brand.
A comparative study on the long-term effectiveness of two established relational metrics in explaining different customer behaviors varying in their performance difficulty in an understudied domain of durable products.
