e-Loyalty among millennials: Personal characteristics and social influences
Introduction
The e-retail landscape, though booming, is also a highly competitive sector globally and is populated with multiple players with multiple channel offerings. The most critical problem remains the customer acquisition cost – which is estimated to be significantly higher than in traditional offline contexts (Otero et al., 2014). It, hence, follows that e-loyalty becomes the most crucial factor that decides the profitability of any online business (Malhotra et al., 2017). Identification of factors influencing e-loyalty is of significant interest to online retailers, more so with generational cohorts like millennials, which are technology savvy and very different from their earlier generations. Extant studies on e-loyalty often exclusively focus on the customer perceptions about the technical characteristics of the e-retailers that influences loyalty like website quality and security (e.g., Chen et al., 2015; Cyr et al., 2009; Jeon and Jeong, 2017) or limit their focus on relational factors like trust and satisfaction (e.g. Malhotra et al., 2017; López-Miguens and Vázquez, 2017).
When it comes to Millennials, these technical or relational characteristics may not suffice to explain loyal behaviour. Studies have suggested that in comparison with previous generations, millennials exhibit different values, characteristics, and behaviour (Eastman et al., 2014, Gurău, 2012). Further, as millennials are to technology from very early days, technology has a profound impact on their cognitive, affective, and finally, social outcomes (Immordino-Yang et al., 2012).
Focusing on e-loyalty from the perspective of millennials is very important for both theoretical and online marketing practice. Millennials exceed 25% of the world's total population (Nusair et al., 2013) and have large disposable income (Gurău, 2012, Knittel et al., 2016). A study done by Deloitte on millennials in different countries has shown that they are more connected and have a strong ‘social conscience’.1 Also referred as an online generation (Mangold and Smith, 2012), they are observed to be more market and technology savvy than their earlier generations (Nowak et al., 2006; Brosdahl and Carpenter, 2011), and digital technologies influence a major share of life activities of millennials - be it socializing, hobbies or shopping (Lissitsa and Kol, 2016). They process website information much faster than the previous generations (Kim and Ammeter, 2008) and tend to involve more on online activities, including online shopping (Lester et al., 2006, Smith, 2011). Hence, their responses to online marketing and e-commerce are also likely to be very different from previous generations (Bilgihan, 2016).
Millennials are quite distinct from other generational cohorts also because they show a higher sense of entitlement and display an inclination to reject the social norms of the previous generations (Lazarevic, 2012). They are also known to exhibit lower loyalty towards any products or services (Gurău, 2012, Myers and Sadaghiani, 2010) and to adapt quickly to the innovative changes in technology, especially with those connected with their lifestyle (Shankar et al., 2010). Further, they are very well-connected to their friends and peers (Smith, 2011) and consider the opinions of friends and fellow consumers as more reliable than any company sources (Smith, 2012). Social media has a strong impact on the lives of millennials, as they always prefer to be connected with their peers (Nusair et al., 2013, Veloutsou and McAlonan, 2012). In other words, the peer group influences reflected as subjective norms are a crucial factor, which influences their behavioural responses, including loyalty (Eastman et al., 2013).
Hence, unlike their previous generations, for millennials, personal characteristics and social influence can have a crucial influence on their online loyalty. Thus, existing models on e-loyalty may have limitations in explaining the loyalty formation process among millennials. However, despite such heightened interests in predicting the behaviour of millennials, and despite the well-acknowledged differences in their attitude towards loyalty, a comprehensive model on e-loyalty of millennials is difficult to be found in the literature (Bilgihan, 2016, Rambocas and Arjoon, 2012, Veloutsou and McAlonan, 2012).
This study, therefore, aims at understanding how millennials form loyal relationships with e-retailers by developing a new e-loyalty model that incorporates the indirect influence of personal characteristics like innovativeness, perceived compatibility and social factor such as peer influence.
Section snippets
Review and hypotheses development
To support our conceptual model, we review extant literature on marketing to millennials as well as on e-loyalty. We first look at the literature on millennials to determine the main contribution of our study. Subsequently, we consider the important studies in e-loyalty to develop the hypotheses.
Sample profile and data collection
Since the study was focused on millennials, we wanted to have respondents who are born after 1981. So, the research design comprises of a survey among graduate and postgraduate students from a leading technology institute in India. Data was collected using a physical questionnaire. We asked the respondents to think about the most frequented e-retailing website they have used and then asked them to respond based on their last six months’ experience with this one specific e-retailer. Respondents
Discussion implications
In this paper, we develop and validate a new personal characteristics-based perspective on e-loyalty to understand the loyalty formation among millennial customers. Previous models of e-loyalty have largely disregarded personal characteristics which are very crucial in the context of millennial customers. Compared to the previous generations, attitudinal and behavioural changes among millennials are a matter of concern for marketers due to the differences over earlier generational cohorts. Most
Keyoor Purani is a Professor in the Marketing Area at Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode. He works in the area of Brand Communications, Services Marketing and Digital Marketing. He has publications in Journal of Business Research, Journal of Services Marketing, International Business Review, Journal of Retailing and consumer Services, Journal of Product and Brand Management, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, Marketing Intelligence and Planning among other international
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2023, Journal of Retailing and Consumer ServicesCitation Excerpt :Consumer behavior research has found several factors why a consumer feels loyalty, including customization, interactive, interface layout, neighborhood, and incentives, product line, general impression(Srinivasan et al., 2002)reputation satisfaction (Casaló et al., 2008). ( Roy et al., 2014), ease of use (Purani et al., 2019), deemed valuable (Molinillo et al., 2021). According to (De Oña, 2021)consumer loyalty is the willingness of consumers to return to make purchases and are willing to recommend to others.
Keyoor Purani is a Professor in the Marketing Area at Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode. He works in the area of Brand Communications, Services Marketing and Digital Marketing. He has publications in Journal of Business Research, Journal of Services Marketing, International Business Review, Journal of Retailing and consumer Services, Journal of Product and Brand Management, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, Marketing Intelligence and Planning among other international journals. He has co-authored a popular textbook in advertising and promotion published by McGraw Hill and has co-edited a book on Boundary Spanning elements published by Springer International, Switzerland.
Deepak S. Kumar is an Associate Professor in Marketing at Amrita School of Business. He has completed his Fellow Program in Management from Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, India. His present research interests include visual aesthetics, servicescapes, green marketing, technology adoption and e-atmospherics. He has published in many international journals including Journal of Services Marketing, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, The Marketing Review, Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology, AMA Summer/Winter Conference proceedings.
Sunil Sahadev is the Professor at the Salford Business School, University of Salford. His research looks at managing employees who span the boundary between organisations and its customers and considers issues like role stress, customer orientation, and employee motivation. He has published research articles in journals such as the Journal of World Business, Human Resources Management Journal. Management International Review, International Journal of Human Resources Management and International Marketing Review. He has also co-edited a book in Boundary Spanning elements published by Springer International, Switzerland.