The Role of Consumer Confidence in Creating Customer Loyalty
通过元分析研究13个服务行业，发现消费者信心会调节价值、品牌和关系公平对客户忠诚的影响，且影响因行业而异，为企业在经济衰退期调整客户保留策略提供依据。
How can firms retain customers during recessions? To answer this question, we investigate the moderating role of consumer confidence (CC) on the effects of three types of crucial customer loyalty strategies. These strategies are value equity (VE), brand equity (BE), and relationship equity (RE), collectively called customer equity drivers (CEDs). We build on economics and marketing theories to develop our hypotheses on the concerned moderating role. A meta-analysis is used to synthesize the multilevel results of 13 service industries and to test the hypotheses. In addition, we use several robustness checks to validate the findings of the meta-analysis. The results consistently show that CC partly influences the effects of CEDs on customer loyalty and this influence varies across industries. These findings suggest that managers in service industries should consider CC as an important criterion for effectively adjusting customer loyalty strategies to their specific situation. Specifically, during recessions, when CC is relatively low, VE is effective for retaining customers, but this is more apparent for noncontractual settings than for contractual settings. Also, BE is more effective but only for noncontractual firms.