The study was conducted to develop and validate a measure of customer loyalty that addresses four hypothesized dimensions of customer loyalty—affective loyalty, social compliance loyalty, high-sacrifice loyalty, and low-alternative loyalty. Extant measures of customer loyalty were presented and critiqued with respect to a widely accepted definition of customer loyalty. Specifically, loyalty is the “biased, behavioral response expressed over time by some decision-making unit with respect to one or more alternative brands out of a set that is the function of psychological (i.e., decision-making), evaluative processes” (Jacoby and Chestnut, 1978). Jackson's (1970) Sequential System of scale construction was used for scale development.; Based on confirmatory factor analyses to test hypothesized and alternative measurement models of customer loyalty dimensions, there are four dimensions of loyalty that resemble the four-factor structure of organizational commitment originally proposed by McGee and Ford (1993). The validity of three successfully developed scales was also supported by their significant and substantial degree of association with consumer behavior variables including self-reported price insensitivity, repeat purchase of brands, external search for alternative brands, and participation in word-of-mouth.
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