Abstract:

Loyalty is a phenomenon that recently has gained a lot of attention because of increased competition within different industries. Regardless of the form of loyalty, loyal customers are certainly a valuable asset to any company, and various notable examples exist in research literature supporting this fact. It is, for instance, common marketing knowledge that winning over new customers is many times more expensive than keeping current ones. It has to be taken into account that each industry can exhibit specific customer loyalty formation mechanisms, our interest specifically lies with customer loyalty in retailing. Within this context corporate social responsibility can play a significant role in the loyalty formation through employee and community engagement, social programs, solving environmental issues, etc. The goal of the current investigation is to disclose the impact corporate social responsibility has upon customer loyalty formation in retailing. In order to attain this goal the authors have employed a quantitative (survey) method. Two research questions were posed in the current investigation: RQ1: What is the impact of corporate social responsibility upon customer loyalty formation in retailing in the Baltic states? RQ2: Does corporate social responsibility activities lead to the customer loyalty, rather than the repeated purchase?