Consumer Loyalty and Its Formation Process

Abstract

Consumer loyalty represents one of the most important research directions of the psychology of a consumer behavior. Modern authors, whose study subject is a consumer loyalty, pay great attention to the formation of the main psychological mechanisms of the loyalty formation.

Consumer loyalty is being formed gradually by going through all stages of dealing with the goods. The most important stages of shaping a customer loyalty is consumption and feedback. When considering psychological characteristics of a consumer at these stages, it is important to consider the problem of the satisfaction/intensity on which is based the preconditions of the consumer loyalty formation.

Loyalty arises in the moment when a good becomes important because of its functional characteristics and the emotional connection is born between a consumer and a good. Satisfaction, price, consumer’s emotion, expectations and the results of a consumption may be distinguished as the main factors, while the repetitive consumption of the same goods - as the loyalty signs

The formation of consumer loyalty is not spontaneous. It goes through certain stages of interaction between consumer and goods and the attention is paid to the situational factors, goods characteristics and on the personal and the so cial-psychological characteristics of a consumer.

Therefore, the behavior of a consumer is presented as the process of making decisions about purchase, which is mostly descriptive process and is not expressed at the systematic level. From our viewpoint, one of the main reasons is an inadequate approach to the processing the results of internal and external conditions of a consumption.