Customer loyalty and complex services The impact of corporate image on quality, customer satisfaction and loyalty for customers with varying degrees of service expertise

Tor Wallin Andreassen: Norwegian School of Management, The Graduate School, and Stockholm University, School of Business

Bodil Lindestad: Norwegian Institute for Research in Marketing (NiM) at the Norwegian School of Management, Sandvika, Norway

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: The authors gratefully acknowledge the data provided through the funding by sponsoring companies of The Norwegian Customer Satisfaction Barometer and the support of the Service Forum at The Norwegian School of Management. We are also grateful for valuable comments made by two anonymous International Journal of Service Industry Management reviewers.

Introduction

In today's competitive markets services and service companies within the same industry are becoming increasingly similar. Differentiation through the delivery channel (i.e. delivery of services against payment) is difficult. A growing number of service companies have embarked on a journey of positioning through the communication channel (i.e. advertising and personal selling) (Andreassen and Bredal, 1996), with the objective of building strong corporate images in order to create relative attractiveness. This development is in line with Lovelock (1984) who claims that:"

(images) ... are likely to play only a secondary role in customer choice decisions unless competing services are perceived as virtually identical on performance, price, and availability (p. 134)."

Consequently we would expect that corporate image under current market conditions will play an important role in both attracting and retaining customers.

Research related to consumer behavior in the field of service marketing has progressed steadily over the years. Measured by the impact and amount of work done within customer satisfaction research, it is fair to say that the dominant theories are disconfirmation of expectations (Churchill and Suprenant, 1982; Oliver, 1980; Oliver and DeSarbo, 1988; Swan, 1983) and cognitive psychology (Folkes, 1988; Weiner, 1980, 1985a, 1985b). In the service marketing literature these streams of theory have been used in the prediction of consumer behavior. Disconfirmation theory focusses on cognition of transaction specific experiences as a foundation for customer (dis)satisfaction and subsequent consumer behavior whereas cognitive psychology has studied the importance of cognitive schemas in the decision process and consumer behavior.

Research within the service marketing literature related to the impact of corporate image (i.e. attitude toward a company) and its impact on customer loyalty does not share the same long traditions as customer satisfaction research. Apart from the early conceptual work...