Does Customer Satisfaction Affect the Quality, Trust - Loyalty Links in the Marketing Channel Context? - An Empirical Study on Taiwan Hypermarket

Marketing channel as the downstream end of a supply chain plays a crucial role in generating cash flow and meeting the demands of customers. The extant body of literature postulates that antecedent-consequence links that customer perceived value and service quality foster customer loyalty, leading to long term profitability. Nowadays, given the proliferation of global hypermarket organizations and their adapting retail positioning strategy, it is worthwhile to re-examine the validity of those postulations. This study conducts an empirical study on the customer perception of quality of product/service toward a multinational chained hypermarket store in Taiwan. The objective is to test the established theory in the domain of SCM by constructing the hypotheses based on the extant literature and allowing a structure equation modeling (SEM) for path analysis. The contingency theory in organization behavior explains the findings that are seemingly contradictory to the well-accepted paradigms. The outcome provides an insight into how hypermarket retailers should make improvement in customer satisfaction to reinforce customer loyalty while executing the 'low-price, low-service' marketing strategy.