The Essence And Types Of Customer Loyalty

The growth of market saturation and the development of information society determines a growing attention of company management and representatives of marketing departments to building relationships with consumers in a way aiming to retain them and form their loyalty. The ambiguity of interpretation of the essence of the concept "customer loyalty" and contradictions in distinguishing its types require clarification of the conceptual apparatus of loyalty marketing, which is the main purpose of this article. The article summarizes the theoretical principles of determining the nature of the concept "customer loyalty", clarifies the essential characteristics of this concept, which makes it possible to conduct a comprehensive assessment. So, customer loyalty is interpreted by the author as a result of feedback in the company marketing communications system, which appears as a willingness to recommend the company to contact audiences as a result of full satisfaction of the consumer choice valuable attributes and as regular consumption of goods or services of one company with the available competitor attractive propositions. Having summarized scientific approaches to distinguishing the types of customer loyalty, the author proved the existence of transitional loyalty that allows businesses to reallocate the marketing budget, identifying target segments of consumers to form their loyalty, and reducing the cost of futureless segments which will increase the efficiency of marketing activity of the enterprise as a whole. The essence of the concept "loyalty marketing" is clarified and the object of control in loyalty marketing is determined to be relations with loyal customers and consumers with transitional loyalty which makes it possible to clearly distinguish between such concepts as "relationship marketing", "customer relationship management" (CRM) and "partner relationship management" (PRM, "partnership marketing").