Customer Psychological Attachment to Service Firms: The Impact of Firm-Level and Situational Variables

Abstract

Since the publication of Dwyer, Schurr and Oh's (1987) paper, understanding and managing on-going relationships with exchange partners is an important issue in the marketing literature. However, most of the empirical research to date focuses on dyadic relationships within a business-to-business context (see, e.g., Anderson and Weitz 1992; Morgan and Hunt 1994). The issue of relationships in the context of consumer marketing receives relative neglect in academic research (see Sheth and Parvatiyar 1995). Some notable exceptions include Bendapudi and Berry's (1997) theoretical framework for understanding consumer motivation for maintaining a relationship with a service firm and Gwinner, Gremler and Bitner's (1998) empirical examination of the benefits received by consumers as a result of engaging in long-term relational exchanges with service firms. The present research investigated the impact of a select set of firm-level and situational variables on a customer's psychological attachment to a firm.