Introduction
The study chooses smartphone applications which have update experience as the study case to analysis if it will cause customer attrition. Application updates aims to make up the bugs which may cause bad effects on using, while in fact, most changes will be resisted by customers. We adapt three elements to collect data about the attitude of customers toward applications update, the conclusion illustrates, customers will resist changes in some conditions and cause customers attrition. Therefore, application developers should focus on the personal emotional reaction and cognitive evolution as well as predict what may influence the customers normal use after the applications update to make correct update decisions. In order to define the relationship between variable and result., we take smartphone application which had experienced update as examples and choose fsQCA as the methodology to analysis.
Literature Review
Resistance to change is a psychological process, Brehm(1966)claims customers resist to change origins from their believe that they have rights to control free, when this rights be challenged, this resistance behavior will happen due to they want to protect their own rights. Some scholars distinguished the concept of resistance to change: when receptors in the low involvement or limited cognize, their resistance behaviors is likely to be considered as the passive resistance; otherwise, the behaviors would be recognized as active resistance (Nabih,1997). Bagozz and Lee(1999) think that functional barrier is an important factors which influence the degree of innovation receptance, when customers think products after update cannot meet their function needs will cause resistance to change. Resistance always occur passively, bemuse of the disturb of the former habits of using (Ram &Sheth 1989), and former studies also indicate that prejudice towards changes is one of significant factors. Because changes are uncertainty, Fiske and Taylor(1991)claims that uncertainty can make people hate changes and Whitson and Galinsky(2008)consider aversion will be the strong driver of resistance to change to reduce uncertainty and risk. In terms of a company, the cost of maintaining a old customer is much lower than these of develop a new user, Actually, customer attrition is response of entrepreneur revenue and the vital section in development of companies. The famous american honesty management scholar Frederic Reichheld’s research indicates that when the extension of the commercial relationship of entrepreneur and customers, companies can acquire fatter profit through the relationship.
Conclusions
This study chooses fsQCA as methodology to define the relationship between resistance to change and customer attrition instead of using structural equation modeling. Sometimes, even customers have right cognitive evolution towards changes, when they find their efficiency be influenced by it, they also resist to change; while adverse emotional reaction also has an adverse effect on customer retention though they build positive cognitive evolution about changes. there is a remain circumstance of lossing of customers that when customers hate changes and they find their efficiency be influenced by update, the honesty of this product will also decrease. This three condition all contribute to customers attrition which should be paid more attention by companies.
Chinese economic develops fast and have became the second economic entity all around the world. The development of economic pushes the popularize of mobile clients. Accordingly, whenever and wherever the consumers are, they can acquire and share information about productions directly, e-word-of-mouth (eWOM) becomes one of the important part of online marketing. Customers prefer to trust opinion leaders and real users’ feedback rather than the advertisements which are made by companies. The choice preference of information source accelerate the development of social media.
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association, have grown rapidly and have advocated for the burgeoning new industry. (Robert V. et al., 2010) Marketers and sociologists have recognized the importance of the phenomenon of word of mouth, for more than half a century, proposing, for example, that WOM affects the majority of all purchase decisions (Brooks 1957; Dichter 1966).They find that the “friend who recommends a tried and trusted product” rather than the “salesman who tries to get rid of merchandise” (Dichter 1966, p. 165). Marketing scholars has evolved from a transaction orientation to one based on relationships (Vargo and Lusch 2004) Consumers are regarded as active coproducers of value and meaning, whose WOM use of marketing communications can be idiosyncratic, creative, and even resistant (Brown, Kozinets, and Sherry 2003; Kozinets 2001; Muñiz and Schau 2005; Thompson and Sinha 2008) Therefore, when the behavior is on/off, impact measured as probability of purchase can differ substantially from impact measured as attitude change (Robert East 2015).
This study will select significant respondents from Chinese social media users as sample. The WOM communication is send information to marketers from the market-based message interaction community ,gathering consumers with same interests. In this study, not only structural equation modeling (SEM) will be used to test research model. But also using the fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) and SPSS, the first method attempts to find a new configuration to verify the finding and the SPSS can be used to make reliability analysis and validity analysis. WOM of the research model will also be tested by fsQCA and SPSS to obtain the conclusion about what extent do two communication ways influence consumers’ purchase preference.
We want to explore different results between opinion leaders and the real users in different communication ways. Based on the results we will give some implication to both marketing scholars and practitioners.
The marketing scholars and practitioners start to consider a new concept, which pay attention to the government policies and company methods would cause a deep influence to develop a sustainable marketing. Because of the customer equity take a more and more importance place in consumer research, companies have become aware of the importance of sustainability, but customers may not realize the significance of this factor. When companies cannot obtain the feedback from the customers, they can not meet the needs as well. Nevertheless, researchers have attempted to determine whether sustainable marketing customer equity, both in positive and negative ways. Using algorithms of configurations of antecedent condition s to refine the shortcomings of symmetric variable hypotheses (McClelland, 1998; Woodside, 2015).
Sustainable marketing includes environmental, economic, and social dimensions, in addition to the ethical management dimensions that guide sustainable marketing strategies through CSR (Lii et al., 2013).The environmental dimension requires to build a eco-friendly image, the economic dimension requires to achieve short- and long-term economic goals(bansal 2005); The social dimension requires that companies enhance social and human wellbeing (Kim et al, 2015; Sun et al., 2016).
When marketing research has turned to customer lifetime value (CLV) (Rust et al.,2004), they find the future profit is value equity, brand equity, and relation equity has been accepted by most researchers as major drivers. This study bases on models of which factors can influence value of customers and which are not. Structural equation modeling (SEM) has been used to show that sustainable marketing has positive effects on customer equity drivers (Sun, Garrett, & Kim, 2016). However, it has shortage in most empirical behavioral science and business research, in order to lessen influence of the method limitation; a subset of qualitative comparative analysis called faQCA is applied to study. This study make a general conclusion that in the cross-culture, customers can not accept companies lose anyone dimension, even though they perform at normal level in others. Nevertheless if a company achieve a high goal in one dimension, it is also can be admitted by consumers.
This research adapts two different countries as the sample to define their value and motivations. And the Adidas as the sample brand to be used in the study. Using the fuzzyset Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) attempts to find a new point to explain configural antecedents, to verify the finding and to overcome the shortages. The result of this study is aimed to find the way to narrow the gap between companies, customers and sustainable concepts.