The Determinants of Credit Card Customer Loyalty: An Empirical Study in a Chinese Context

Customer loyalty has been the focus of marketing research in the past decades, and it is generally recognized that the key to profitability is more likely to involve the retention of current profitable customers and increasing their spending than in trying to win new customers. However, the conceptualization and measurement of customer loyalty in credit card marketing, especially in a Chinese context, has not been addressed, nor does the development and empirical validation of customer loyalty determinants model. Based on theoretical literatures review, this paper proposes a comprehensive set of constructs and hypotheses that has been compiled with a methodology for testing them. The questionnaire was created in order to measure the determinants including commitment, switching cost, customer satisfaction, and perceived value. Then data were collected from more than 1000 credit card customers of a commercial bank in China, which were analyzed by using structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques. Based on the influencing intensities of the determinants of customer loyalty, further discussions have been put forward and the research implications and limitations as well.