The relative contribution of love and trust towards customer loyalty

•We offer a novel explanation of why customers stay loyal in a business relationship using the constructs of love and trust.•Customer experience of love, and trust, are both significant predictors of customer loyalty. Love is a stronger driver of loyalty than trust.•In addition to trust, love is essential for keeping customer loyalty in a business relationship.•We also provide empirical evidence that love is a concept relevant to the business context and is not limited to personal relationships.

This study examines the respective role of two constructs, love and trust, as drivers of customer loyalty in a business-to-consumer service context. A review of the psychology and marketing literature suggests prominent roles for both love and trust in relation to long-term interpersonal relationships. The likely interaction between love and trust foreshadowed in prior studies also suggests the need of studying both factors simultaneously. Yet, to the authors' knowledge, the relative contribution of love and trust to loyalty has never been examined in the context of B2C service relationships. This study collected 293 valid consumer self-administered questionnaires in a personal care service setting. Analysis results, using structural equation modelling, show that customer experience of love, and trust, are both significant predictors of customer loyalty. However, love is a stronger driver of loyalty than trust. This study contributes to our understanding of consumers' unspoken needs or wants for love and confirms their need for trust in service encounters, helping frontline employees and managers to perform better in their efforts to generate and maintain customer loyalty. The study also makes a cross-disciplinary contribution to the literature on loyalty, love and trust, in marketing and psychology.

Chinese abstract本研究探讨在企业对消费者（B2C）服务模式下，热爱和信任这两种客户忠诚度推动力的作用。回顾心理学和营销文献，爱和信任在维持长期人际关系中发挥着突出作用。之前的研究中预示了热爱和信任之间的相互作用，还建议需要同步研究这两个因素。然而，据笔者所知，人们从未在B2C服务背景下研究过热爱和信任对客户忠诚度的相对贡献。此次研究收集了有关个人护理服务设置的293份有效消费者自填问卷。通过结构方程模型分析，热爱和信任的顾客体验，是客户忠诚度的显著预测指标。但是，热爱是比信任更强大的推动力。这项研究有助于我们理解消费者对爱的潜在需求或渴望，并证明消费者在服务接触中需要信任，帮助一线员工和经理更好地营造和维护客户忠诚度。本文也为营销和心理学领域跨学科研究忠诚度、热爱和信任做出了贡献。