Building better causal models to measure the relationship between attitudes and customer loyalty

Perceived quality, satisfaction and brand/corporate image/reputation are probably the most widely used variables to investigate customer attitudes in market research. Several models have been proposed to analyse the relationships between these variables and customer loyalty. All these models have a similar focus: to study the causal mechanism that relates customers' evaluations with their future expected behaviour. In this paper, we propose that all these models are not useful for applied market research because they are not proper representations of causal processes and do not provide relevant information about the effects of managerial actions. Two main reasons are the basis for our postulation: (1) in cross-sectional designs, attitudinal variables should not be unidirectionally linked; (2) attitudes can not be manipulated by companies. Finally, we offer guidelines for building more useful models to satisfy the requirements of practitioners investigating the effect of management policies. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]