Factors affecting customer loyalty of different strategic groups in the Vietnamese supermarket sector

The main objective of this research is to investigate factors affecting customer loyalty of different supermarket strategic groups, as the term of strategic groups in the grocery sector appears to have been ignored by most researchers and the topic of comprehensive factors affecting customer loyalty are is under-researched. There were two main phases of emperical research, including expert and supermarket-consumer interviews (Phase One) and questionnaire survey (Phase Two). In particular, there were 3055 questionnaires collected from 17 March 2018 to 27 July 2018 in the Vietnamese supermarkets through many channels, including email, postal and face-to-face contact. After data screening, 2913 questionnaires remained in the dataset. The three main quantitative techniques used were exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM). The research used both SPSS and AMOS 24. The results revealed there are seven main direct indicators for customer loyalty: retail brand experience, service quality related to in-store employees’ knowledge and attitudes toward consumers, customer satisfaction, promotion effects, switching costs, e-service quality related to a core e-service quality scale, and alternative attractiveness. In that, customer satisfaction can explain only 17.8 percent variation in customer loyalty. In addition, price, habit and income also have a slight positive impact on customer loyalty. This research also revealed seven main factors directly and positively affecting customer satisfaction: customer perceived value, in-store logistics, service quality related to service employees’ knowledge and attitudes toward consumers, store image, customer experience, product quality, and alternative attractiveness negatively relating to customer satisfaction. Besides that, switching costs and price also have a slight direct impact on customer satisfaction. Furthermore, this research also found factors directly and positively affecting customer perceived value, including price, in-store logistics, trust, promotion effects, e-service quality related to a core e-service quality scale, service quality and customer service, and that switching costs are negatively associated with customer perceived value. The research also investigated differences across groups, including strategic groups, age ranges, location, gender, income, education level and occupation. The results showed that there were differences between groups regarding factors affecting customer loyalty, customer satisfaction and customer perceived value. It is believed that the research will prove meaningful for both academia and practitioners in understanding issues relating to factors affecting customer loyalty, especially since multigroup analysis was conducted to examine different relationships between constructs in the researched model; the research also revealed that the term ‘strategic groups’ in the grocery sector should not be ignored. The revised research framework generated in this research can be applied in any industry or market. There are some limitations to this research which are presented in section 8.3 and recommendations for future research