THE MANIFESTATIONS OF CUSTOMER LOYALTY IN INDIAN LIFE INSURANCE INDUSTRY: AN EMPIRICAL EXAMINATION

The widespread reverence for customer loyalty among marketers and businesses all across the globe is inspired from its manifestations since it’s the consumption decisions of loyal customers that leave a mammoth mark over the revenues and growth of a firm. A throng of behavioural, attitudinal and cognitive manifestations of customer loyalty are available in the literature some of which are widely acknowledged and accepted whereas others call for further inquiry. These manifestations of loyalty among customers are generally pinned down through their actions (Zeithaml et al., 1996; Jones et al., 2000) or their attitude towards the company or a particular product/ service (Javalgi and Moberg, 1997; Butcher et al., 2001). However, recent literature suggests that another outcome of loyalty is customer preferring a particular service provider to others based upon the conscious evaluation of brand attributes (Gremler and Brown, 1996; Butcher et al., 2001). The paper intends to explore and empirically test various manifestations of customer loyalty in the context of life insurance services thereby, extending the existing knowledge of customer loyalty by outlining the distinctive nature of customer loyalty outcomes and offering useful insights to the marketing practitioners in life insurance industry. The study further groups these manifestations into distinct outcome classes and empirically evaluates them by comparing and contrasting each with the other. It also aims to enrich the literature of customer loyalty by developing and validating a scale for measurement of customer loyalty outcomes with special reference to life insurance services.