Want to know what is going on at Marketing Scales? Read below about the newest books that have been published and other news of interest.
Of the hot marketing research topics in recent years, none is as important in my mind as customer loyalty. You have hit a home run with consumers if they willingly and eagerly buy your brand or patronize your business. It is beyond the scope of this little note to review everything we have learned about loyalty over time but I do want to emphasize here something that many marketers may not clearly realize: loyalty has two parts. The obvious part is the behavior itself such as repeatedly buying the same brand or eating at the same restaurant. Those behaviors can be observed or noted from purchase data. But, there is another less obvious component sometimes referred to as psychological commitment. It is a mixture of the customer’s positive beliefs and intentions about the object of loyalty (brand, retailer, company).
Figuring out these attitudes and behaviors has been an important topic of research among marketing scholars for several decades. As noted above, the behavior component can be monitored relatively easily without cooperation of the customer, but that isn’t the case with the commitment component. Many marketers may believe that monitoring behavior is a good way to measure loyalty. Maybe in some cases that is true but the reason why it is not sufficient in other cases is because consumers can engage in repeated behavior for other reasons than loyalty. For example, there are consumers who shop at the same grocery store over an extended period of time because they have little or no choice of stores in their shopping area. Many could be eager to shop elsewhere and, once they have a choice, they switch. Thus, it is risky to assume that repeated behavior is synonymous with loyalty. In contrast, when a person is strongly committed to a brand, a store, or a company then that drives the repeated purchases and produces a stronger form of loyalty.
A common way used to precisely measure the commitment component of loyalty is with multi-item scales. Scholars have been creating and working with these types of loyalty measures for years. I have personally reviewed about 300 scales that have something to do with loyalty or patronage. New ones are being featured here now and their names are Loyalty (Conative), Loyalty to the Store, Patronage Likelihood (Fast Food Restaurant), and Repatronage Intention. If you want to know more about these measures and the studies in which they were used, brief descriptions will be on the homepage for a couple of weeks and the full reviews (including the items and who used them) are now permanent documents in the repositiory here at the website.
If a consumer says she is willing to buy a product, is that an expression of purchase intention? If a researcher uses a summated scale that includes items such as I like the product and I want to buy the product, is that a measure of purchase intention? If a marketer wants to estimate demand for a product concept that might be produced in the future, is a purchase intention scale the proper measure to use? My answer to these questions is NO! For my reasons, read the latest pet-peeve blog at the Office of Scale Research.
The library database here at MarketingScales.com now contains over 3,800 reviews of multi-item scales. This is a unique database; nothing like this exists in academia or industry with respect to measures with known reliability for use in consumer behavior research. The majority of the scales in the database have been reported in at least one of the nine published volumes of the Marketing Scales Handbook series but there are a growing number of new scales that are being added almost every week that have not been in any of the books. (They are expected to be in Volume 10 when it is finished in 2019.) Further, even though Volumes 1 to 4 are no longer available, reviews of the scales they had which dealt with consumer research are available in the database. Finally, the reviews published in all previous volumes are updated in the database as significant new information becomes available.
The bottom line is that, as useful as any one volume in the series can be, only the library contains all of the scales and has the most up-to-date information.
Volume 9 of the Marketing Scales Handbook series has been published! If you are familiar with any of the past volumes, this book is generally similar in scope but the material is completely new. None of the scales in Volume 9 were reviewed in the previous books. Volume 9 has reviews of 433 scales, more than any book since Volume 6. In terms of coverage, there are scales related to typical topics such as brands, advertising, stores, purchasing, and pricing. Additionally, there are new scales for some "smaller" topics that were less covered (if at all) in the previous books such as environmentalism, service dominant orientations, symbolic embeddedness, word-of-mouth activity, switching costs, product installations, place attachment, interactions with employees, and sports. If you are interested, read more about Volume 9 and download the free sample.
For purchases by individuals, Volume 9 is only available as a paperback. Initially, it will only be available from Amazon.com or CreateSpace.com (the Amazon.com printing company).
