Consumer Perception Of Company Reputation and Loyalty

Reputation is usually considered as the assessment in which a thing or any person is commonly held, as a name or favorable standing or as the way in which a particular person or thing is known for. Reputation is a way to solve the problem of experiencing goods and services. It has been determined the relationship between loyalty and reputation of the organization and finally concluded that the reputation of the company is strongly associated with loyalty as far as the public sector is concerned but this point was not further discussed. 

Though a lot of studies have been done to conclude customer loyalty as a dependent variable but still there is a vast margin of research to be conducted in future in different spheres of this construct. On the other hand the truth of the importance of customer loyalty as an enduring asset cannot be falsified. It is fundamental for organizations to build up long term and mutually beneficial associations with the customers. The research of the Makrothink Institute published in Journal of Public Administration and Governance in 2004; The Relationship between Reputation, Customer Satisfaction, Trust, and Loyalty Has shown that: there is inter relationship of reputation, customer satisfaction and trust on customer loyalty. According to the observations reputation is the major independent variable that has significant relationship with customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and trust. 

The most critical issue in organizations to be measured is customer loyalty. It is necessary to create customer loyalty due to the intense competition and saturated market situations. The world is turning towards the loyal customers from satisfied ones as it is the most integral part of the present businesses. In the era of extreme competition, research concludes that building of durable customer relations for long lasting business is mandatory for managers. It is the matter of concern to find out whether loyalty is a behavioral measure or an attitudinal measure. Nowadays consumers consider their requirements more than usual and they are highly expecting the spectacular standards of service. 

Customer loyalty measures are different in different fields. In 2004 Beerlie et al assumed another dimension of loyalty and recognized it as an essential dimension, it defined loyalty as habitual and further claimed that staying with a definite trademark is better for a customer than consuming energy to change it. Cumulatively most of the researchers have discriminated between interactive and effective loyalties. Here we take the example of a bank for understanding both concepts. In Interactive loyalty the customer desires to use the bank in future as well, whereas effective loyalty describes the extent a customer desires to use the bank and the attitude what the bank is. Bloemer explains that the outcomes from studies on service loyalty could not be pertained to product loyalty, as service loyalty applied to customer-clerk connection.

Customer satisfaction is, in general, an attitude shaped on the basis of experience after clients acquire a product or use a service and pay for them. It is an indication of being pleased with a product or a service. Satisfaction is the measurement of the experience of working together with a service provider till the present point of time, and it is used by consumers to expect future experience. Satisfaction may not always be the sole reason of customer’s loyalty. Although it can be said that loyalty is associated with satisfied customers. Satisfaction appears after consumption of some product or service which is the result of actual and expected utility of product (Khokhar et al., 2011). Since the buying behaviors, patterns, needs, and wants, satisfaction level of all the customers are different therefore it is difficult to measure which particular product or service offered will be giving contentment to a particular group of customers. There is a positive relationship between satisfaction and customer’s loyalty, consequently more the chances of sustained survival of an organization. 

“The customers who are satisfied come back and buy more and tell others about the experiences, whether it is positive or negative”- Fornell