Investigating Customer Club as a Marketing Activities (Case Study: Asia Insurance)

Abstract

Customer clubs are assumed to create loyalty from the company perspective (Reichheld and Sasser, 1990). However, they seem to have attained a position of their own in many companies, and to have an institution-like function (Butscher, 2002). Such a position supports the alienation between the customer club and other parts of the business. As a consequence, many club programs still offer their customers the same kinds of benefits as they did when the club was launched, even if the competitive situation has changed considerably and having a customer club has become almost a standard feature. The fact that many customers are members of several clubs, even in the same industry, is seen as a sign of diffuse customer perceptions of the loyalty concept. The changing competitive situation for most companies, in turn, means that the reasons for joining a club have changed considerably: we thus define the customer club as it was perceived by most customers in Gustafsson et al. (2004): “A membership related to the specific company including benefits that are mostly apparent in customers’ relationships as repayment formed in different ways and initiated by the company”. So, in this article we investigate the customer club concept and represent a model for it.

Keywords: customer club, customer satisfaction