Vanebeteende - Det lojala beteendet?
The Swedish sports retail industry has experienced extensive growth during the last decade, and this has attracted new entrants to the market, both start-ups and international followers. This has inevitably put more pressure on incumbents, which are now confronted with major challenges as how to retain their customers and market shares. Customer loyalty has been proved to be an important factor for customer retention and proposed to constitute inertia of switching behavior. In light of this problematization, the purpose of this study is to describe the underlying factors of loyalty and whether purchase habits could further explain customer loyalty. The aim is also to understand the strategic implications of the factors involved. The thesis is being actualized through a case study of Intersport and conducted with a quantitative approach, through an online survey and past purchase data. Our results reveal that loyalty can be explained by different factors depending on which loyalty measure (purchase intention, loyalty perception and recommendation intention) is being used. Past purchase behaviour, in terms of frequency i.e. the number of purchase occasions, was found to have a positive effect on loyalty regardless the type of loyalty measure examined. The findings improve our understanding of how incumbents could exploit these underlying factors to strengthen switching barriers and customer loyalty.