Established model
Behavioural and attitudinal loyalty
Jacob Jacoby & Robert W. Chestnut · 1978
Buying repeatedly and being committed are different things, and only one of them survives a better offer.
Its place in the frameworkOmni Core›Loyalty Programs
What it does
Repeat purchase can come from habit, convenience or lack of an alternative, and looks identical in the data to genuine commitment. The distinction matters most where it is inconvenient: a loyalty programme that rewards repeat purchase may be paying people who were never going anywhere, while doing nothing about the ones who were.
- Reach for it when
- Before designing or renewing a loyalty scheme, and when repeat-purchase figures are being read as evidence of loyalty.
- Where it stops
- Attitudinal loyalty can only be measured by asking, with all the softness that implies. The distinction is easy to state and difficult to operationalise.
Jacob Jacoby & Robert W. Chestnut, Brand Loyalty: Measurement and Management, Wiley, 1978.
Why it sits at Loyalty Programs
Deliberate mechanisms for rewarding continued custom: what the mechanism is, whether it pays for itself, whether it changes behaviour at all, and how it ends.
A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:
- The mechanismLoyalty-programme design literature on earning and redemption structures, and their effect on perceived value.
- The economicsAccounting treatment of loyalty liabilities and breakage, and the incremental-margin analysis that determines whether a programme pays.
- Behaviour changeIncrementality analysis and the selection problem: loyal customers join loyalty programmes, which is not the same as the programme creating loyalty.
- Winding downResearch on loss aversion applied to programme changes, where a reduction in earning is felt far more sharply than an equivalent increase was.
What it touches elsewhere
Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Loyalty Programs lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.
- Business CoreThe accumulated point liability is a real obligation and belongs in the financial reporting.
- MonetisationA loyalty programme is a pricing decision, and its cost comes out of the same margin.
- Brand CoreLoyalty measured behaviourally is not the same as preference, and a programme can produce one without the other.
- Data CoreEstablishing whether a programme changes behaviour is an incrementality question and needs designing as one.
Filed at the same place
These answer questions that arise at Loyalty Programs too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.
- The service–profit chainInternal quality produces satisfied employees, who produce satisfied customers, who produce profit — in that order.
Elsewhere in Omni Core
These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.
All 125 models