AFFECT AND CONATION IN BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS RELATIONSHIPS: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF LOYALTY LIFECYCLE SEQUENCE.

Loyalty measures in early loyalty studies were often overly simplistic, concerned primarily with repeat purchase behaviors (Jacoby and Chestnut 1978). Researchers now believe loyalty to be a more complex phenomenon, manifest through both attitude and behavior (Day 1969), and that the attitudinal components of loyalty may be characterized by the psychological processes of cognition, affect, and conation (Dick and Basu 1994). Recent theory further suggests that these processes constitute a loyalty lifecycle: cognitive loyalty affective loyalty conative loyalty (Oliver 1999). Little has been done to corroborate or refute this perspective of loyalty. This study seeks to (1) classify business-to-business exchange participants into either affective or conative phases of the loyalty lifecycle, (2) identify the sequencing of these two loyalty phases, and (3) determine how loyalty phase might influence performance evaluations of complex business-to-business marketing exchange. Three thousand four hundred eighty six business-customers of a large systems software producer representing 2,730 institutional buyers and channel firms from 46 countries are classified into affective or conative phases of the loyalty lifecycle using a finite mixture model. Results show repeat purchase intent to be highly correlated with cognitive and affective attitude. Latent class regression shows these measures to explain 67 percent of the variance in repeat purchase intent. For members of the affective class, repeat purchase intent is most highly correlated with overall product and service satisfaction. For members of the conative class, repeat purchase intent is most highly correlated with a strategic commitment to the producer. Affective and conative lifecycle phase sequence is manifest through correlations between business-customer loyalty phase membership and three proxies of relationship relationship maturity: relational governance (Heide 1994; Macneil 1980; Rindfleisch and Heide 1997), core loyalty (Dick and Basu 1994), and perceptual orientation in marketing exchange (Konovsky 2000). Contrary to theory, results show greater relationship maturity to be more indicative of affective loyalty than conative loyalty. Higher levels of relational governance increase the likelihood of membership in the affective phase of the life-cycle. Core loyalty is greater for members of the affective phase. Core loyalty has a greater marginal effect on exchange satisfaction for members of the affective phase. Members of the affective phase place comparatively less weight on distributional outcomes in marketing exchange. Results suggest that a naïve form of conative loyalty can develop in business-to-business relationships prior to the development of affective loyalty. It is likely that naïve conative loyalty is fostered by socio-emotional cues within the business-to-business "consumption community" that are telegraphed by firm reputation and brand image (Friedman, Vanden Abeele, and De Vos 1993). A similar phenomenon occurs in consumer markets where brands are routinely extended to embrace new or unfamiliar products. For these products, naïve conative loyalty drives initial purchase and use, which ultimately leads to experience and the formation of affective loyalty. In business-to-business relationships, naïve conation and affect may then interact to create the more complex form of conative loyalty characterized in loyalty lifecycle theory Loyalty-to-action defines to the focal objective of a loyalty behavior, such as loyalty-to-purchase or loyalty-to-recommend. Study results also show loyalty lifecycles to be influenced by loyalty-to-action. In the modeled business-to-business relationships the transition from naïve conation to affection occurs more rapidly in the loyalty-to-purchase lifecycle than in the loyalty-to-recommend lifecycle. References available upon request. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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