Customer Loyalty and Supply Chain Management

Many business-to-business (B2B) managers think that customers act rationally and base decisions mostly on price, customer loyalty isn’t considered. Companies outsource various activities, which enable them to improve efficiency, reduce costs, focus more on core competencies and improve their innovation capabilities. Supply Chain Management synchronizes the efforts of all parties—particularly suppliers, manufacturers, retailers, dealers, customers—involved in achieving customer’s needs. Despite much research, the relationship between customer loyalty and the supply chain strategy remains insufficiently explored and understood by practitioners and academics, while the theme has been extensively developed within marketing literature. Customer Loyalty and Supply Chain Management is the result of years of work by the authors on different projects concerning the overlapping areas of supply chains, logistics and marketing, drawing a connection between the literature to provide a holistic picture of the customer loyalty framework. Emphasis is given to the B2B context, where recent research has provided some clues to support the fact that investment in operations, new technologies and organizational strategy have had a significant role in understanding B2B loyalty, particularly in the context of global supply chains. Moreover, the book provides a modernized and predictive model of B2B loyalty, showing a different methodological approach that aims at capturing the complexity of the phenomenon. This book will be a useful resource for professionals and scholars from across the supply chain who are interested in exploring the dimension of customer loyalty in the challenging supplier and customer context.