Predicting Customer Loyalty Group 13 - Project half way report Dr. Professor Zhe Zhang MIS 6324 Introduction to Business Intelligence and Software techniques Naveen Jindal School of Management, UT Dallas Team: Sonika Gopalkrishna Spoorthi Medasani Ujwala Pendem Kirutika Thanigaivelu Sakthi Veerabadran Introduction Over the decades there were tremendous amount of challenges for every business. Customers have more knowledge, they have more options, and they have higher expectations. Customers are more informed with the humungous development in technology. Having more options in front of them, expectations has surpassed in retail industry. Loyalty is a customer having faith that your organization’s product or services offered is the best for them. It is the process of tapping the buying pattern of customers in a store based on their preferences. Customer loyalty is significant because it is economical to retain the old customers rather than acquiring new customers. So, organizations employ loyalty programs which reward customers for their repeat business. ABC retailers is a retail chain with presence in New York. It sells a variety of products ranging from groceries to health and beauty in consumer market segments. During the past year, the client faced shrinking sales because of which, they offered promotions to strengthen their market presence and boost product sales. The challenge was to measure the promotional
Thus, companies seek to strengthen customer loyalty. Brand loyalty is considered to tilt the consumer to purchase the package / product specific brand (Jacoby and Chestnut, 1978). Later, Oliver (1997) defined loyalty as "a deeply held commitment to REBUY or repatronize preferred product / service consistently in the future, thereby causing repetitive same-brand or same brand set purchasing, despite situational influences and marketing activities, which would result in causing switching behavior "(p. 34). This conceptual definition covers two different aspects of loyalty: the behavioral. This is consistent with an integrated conceptual framework proposed by Dick and Basu (1994), that customer loyalty is regarded as a "power relationship between the relative position of the individual and repeat
Developing a loyalty program is challenging. You team must understand what will keep your current customers interested and what will spark them to purchase multiple times.
Consumers are continually moving toward online shopping as opposed to traveling to stores to buy products, which in turn, is forcing businesses to change their marketing approaches to attract and retain customers. For regular stores that customers travel to purchase goods, they are realizing that loyalty rewards actually have very little effect on customers remaining loyal to their business and it is actually cutting into their profit margins by offering these rewards. Online businesses on the other hand are noticing that in order to attract customers to return to their business to buy goods, it is almost mandatory to provide loyalty rewards or else the consumers will just search for a better deal the next time they need to buy
While I’m an atypical U.S. consumer who doesn’t buy into marketing hype, I do have strong product/service loyalty affiliations. I’ll try to keep my Journal entry under 1000 words! I like to revisit the meaning of familiar words. Merriam-Webster (n.d.) defines loyalty as, “The quality or state or an instance of being loyal”. This is exactly what brand loyalty and loyalty programs are trying to create: an ongoing experience with multiple touch-points that captures followers and keeps them engaged through rewards, added value, and “prestige”. The goal is to lengthen “the lifetime value of the customer” (Tanner & Raymond, 2010, p. 284) which helps to maximize profits.
SYSCO was a highly decentralized business composed of over 100 operating companies. Senior executives believed in treating these companies as largely independent businesses whose leaders should be entrepreneurial and growth oriented. Consequently, operating company managers had substantial autonomy; they could market to customers and invest in their businesses as they saw fit.2
U.S. consumers hold 3.3 billion memberships in customer loyalty programs, the 2015 COLLOQUY Loyalty Census shows, a 26% increase over the number of memberships reported in COLLOQUY’s last census study in 2013 (Colloquy, 2015) With loyalty programs established this helps to generate a repeat customers which drives profits and promises future revenue. Consumers need an incentive to purchase a product at a certain place. When Loyalty programs are in place it helps the consumer relate to the product and funnels them towards the product in which they feel that they are apart of. They can build exclusive points and incentives when products are purchased and are then able to use those rewards points at a later time to purchase more goods or even get a portion of the cash back.
The report focuses on data mining approach to predict human wine taste preferences. A large data set is considered with white and red wine samples (“Vinho Verde” wine from Portugal). The inputs include objective tests (e.g. PH values) and the output is based on sensory data (median of at least 3 evaluations made by wine experts). Each expert graded the wine quality between 0 (very bad) and 10 (very excellent). Due to privacy and logistic issues, only physicochemical (inputs) and sensory (the output) variables are available (e.g. there is no data about grape types, wine brand, wine selling price, etc.).
Customer loyalty is the key objective of customer relationship. Loyalty only occurs when there is a positive attitude to a brand perceived to be different. The individual market segments should be targeted in terms of developing customer loyalty. Loyalty is not just repeat buying but also involves the attitudes of customers to a brand. When a customer feels that the product or service was highly satisfying they develop loyalty. If they do not feel as if the product and service was not satisfying there might negative effects.
Loyal customers are excessively important to any business, and businesses spend great amount of their time, energy and money analyzing and captivate those customers. However, the usual definition of a loyal customer that we consider is a high spending customer, and that definition is imperfect. Marketing to customers — based on true loyalty — requires more: complicated measurement, better spend data, and considering that a regular customer is not the same as a loyal customer.
In addition to that Lin (2010) also specifies loyalconsumerspurchase more products and loyal consumers are less-price sensitive and pay less attention to competitors’ advertising. Therefore, when taking in to consideration of above mentioned benefits, it clearly represents the positive impacts of brand loyalty towards a firm. Furthermore Khraim (2011) also confirms that the brand loyalty is vital for afirm to make sure that its brand is kept in the minds of consumers and avoidconsumers from switching to other brands. There are many forces drawing consumers away such as competition, customers’ thirst for variety, etc. hence obtaining and maintaining loyalty for a particular brand is not an easy task thus marketers should clearly understand how loyalty factors can affect consumer buying behavior in the marketplace and find out ways and means to gain brand loyalty towards their productsKhraim (2011).
Throughout the years customer loyalty has grown to be one of the central goals of modern businesses. The longer you bind customers to your business, the less costly these customers become to serve. Over the years these customers become loyal and at some point they even become business builders. They are willing to pay premium prices, they spend more and they bring in new customers. Loyalty programs (discounts, gifts and such) are meant to act as a gate to improve the match between customers and their preferences and thus should benefit the customer. Others, however, claim that loyalty only chains consumers by making them more dependent on producers. Producers have great interest in more information on this topic so they can use this for their own marketing strategies.
From a customer’s point of view, loyalty programs are a means to purchase goods at cheaper prices.
In the rapid changing business world, customer loyalty becomes very important (Dick & Basu, 1994). Thus, lots of company use customer loyalty programmes to increase their customers ' loyalty. Customer loyalty programmes are utilized by companies to offer clients with incentives to purchase their services or goods (Bolton & Kannan, 2000). When a client purchases services or goods, the entity provides the client with award credits or points. The client consequently redeems these points for rewards like discounted or free services or goods. The customer loyalty programmes are operational in different ways. Firstly, consumers must attain a minimum value or number of points prior to redeeming them. Secondly, the consumer might earn award
In spite of the great practical approach the impact and evaluation of loyalty card are very limited in terms of academic interest because the effectiveness of loyalty program has questionable from the customer behavior point of view. We refer some studies to evaluate the impact of loyalty card in business.
The concept of sales promotion is often employed in grocery retailing and therefore takes up a considerable share of financial resources that retailers spend on their marketing initiatives (Persson,1995,p.5).The popularity of sale promotion application has of late became a source of inquiry by both retailers and product manufacturers. Despite the huge sums of money spend annually on sales and promotions, the economics and dynamics of sales promotions are poorly understood. As a result, there is a significantly huge knowledge gap to be filled.