The conceptual domain of service loyalty: how many dimensions?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The majority of research in marketing now represents loyalty as a multi‐dimensional construct; however, agreement on whether it has two or three dimensions is lacking, and measurement of these dimensions has been inconsistent. The purpose of this paper is to utilize theory from the psychology literature on interpersonal relationships to provide theoretical guidance for examining the nature of service loyalty and to uncover its dimensionality. Design/methodology/approach This paper argues for and tests, using survey data from over 300 service customers, a multi‐dimensional conceptualization of loyalty based on theory from the interpersonal psychology literature. Findings The findings of this research highlight that service loyalty is similar to loyalty in interpersonal relationships, providing further evidence for the notion that service provider‐consumer relationships can approximate friendships or even romantic partnerships in terms of loyalty‐like responses. It also suggests that to identify truly loyal customers firms should, at the very least, measure loyalty‐related outcomes from both dimensions. Research limitations/implications The study was limited to consumer‐based services. Originality/value This paper identifies several manifestations of loyalty such as altruism, identification, advocacy, willingness to pay more, and strength of preference that are all‐too‐often ignored in commonly used marketing metrics. Viewing service loyalty in the same manner as pro‐relationship behaviors that develop in friendships and romantic relationships shows promise for the understanding of service loyalty.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".