Investigate the Impact of Relationship Marketing Orientation on Customer Loyalty: The Customer's Perspective

In today's high competitive and globalize banking context, increasing Customer loyalty emerges as the most important challenges faced by marketers. Cultivating loyal customers is frequently argued to be the single most important driver of organizations ’ long-term financial performance, which can lead to increased sales and customer share, lower costs, and higher prices. Therefore marketing scholars emphasize the influence of relationship marketing as a strategically important tool from which customer loyalty can be secured and, as a result, the attainment of higher competitiveness and enhanced customer satisfaction can be achieved. The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the impact of relationship marketing orientation on customer loyalty. The study also aims to test the impact of demographic variables, in association with relationship marketing dimensions, on customer loyalty. The study was carried out in 2008 on a convenience sample of 450 respondents through the distribution of structured questionnaires to bank customers within the area of Amman, Jordan. The data were factor analyzed to determine the key dimensions of relationship marketing orientation measurement scale. Results confirm that the five dimensions scale (Bonding, trust, communication, satisfaction and commitment) possess adequate reliability and internal consistency as well as convergent validity. Results of regression analysis show that relationship marketing orientation is significant in explaining the variation i