Questioning ‘the Ultimate Question’

This research studied the predictive ability of customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score (NPS) on loyalty of Dutch soft-drinks consumers. Additionally, the relationship marketing variables trust, commitment, and attitudinal loyalty (Palmatier et al. 2006) have been added to see if the predictive power of the metrics could be improved. In this thesis a distinction is made between attitudinal loyalty, behavioral loyalty intentions and actual behavioral loyalty. Behavioral intentions are measured by statements on the repurchasing likelihood and spending intention of the favorite soft-drink brand in the subsequent week, while attitudinal loyalty is measured by five statements on “the consumer’s identification with a particular goods provider and preference of a product over alternatives” as Jones and Taylor (2007) define the construct. Actual behavioral loyalty is measured in a second survey where the respondents are asked to indicate how much they spend and bought of soft-drinks in the week after they filled in the first survey. Correlations showed that the NPS has a strong significant relationship with behavioral loyalty. The same counts for customer satisfaction and the additional relationship marketing variables, which showed significant relations with behavioral loyalty intentions. For actual behavioral loyalty (spending behavior) the relational factors affective commitment and attitudinal loyalty showed an insignificant relationship. When looking at the behavioral loyalty intentions (repurchasing and spending intention), it appeared that the NPS increased the explained variance when added to a model of standard demographic variables (gender, age, education and household size). Customer satisfaction and the relationship marketing variables even further increased the explained variance of the regression models. Based on actual spending behavior, the most interest finding is that customer satisfaction and relationship dimensions do not contribute to a higher predictive power of the NPS, while predictions on behavioral loyalty intentions were improved by adding satisfaction and relational variables.