The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand

Foreign Literature

According by Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey co-authored the New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. The book will selected as recommended reading in the CEO Library for CEO Forum, the C-Suite Book Club, and numerous university classes on business and entrepreneurship. Beginning with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, create new markets and forge strategic alliances.

They pioneered Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. They built an internationally bestselling brand and received their industry’s “Hot Brand” award for several consecutive years. They offer their Guiding Principles for Success (GPS) & Shelf Smarts courses to help consumer product brand builders achieve success.

In the marketing and consumer behaviors literature, there is a widely accepted assumption that customer loyalty is conscious. In this study the origin of the view that loyalty is a conscious behavior and/or attitude will tried to be reached and the paradoxical situation will tried to be emphasized by giving place to findings and comments that do not support this view as a result of a broad literature review. In line with the purpose, the basic studies within loyalty literature will examined and discussed deeply and the real reason for this conflict was found to be ignoring the fact that loyalty is a result that contains sensuality. As a result the effect of this paradoxical assumption for enterprises and customers will assessed and significant detections were given.                          

Loyalty is discussed in the context of consciousness and the fact that the non-loyal customers are unconscious will emphasized and consequently the reason for lack of loyalty shall tried to be suggested as customer unconsciousness. This effort may create a serious problem for the management of loyalty because according to this situation the commencement of loyalty will explained with efforts to process, customer unconsciousness is effective in the ending of loyalty or lack of loyalty. This understanding may cause customer loyalty to be discussed as company/brand focused. In the study based on theoretical literature review and the assessment of literature the creation of loyalty literature will examined deeply and loyalty and consciousness discussion was made on the basis of consciousness, characteristics attributed to loyal customers, customer satisfaction and the value offered to the customer and inertia.

According to Wong and Zhou (2006) and Pritchard and Howard(1997), Customer Loyalty Examining the historical course of the studies with the subject of loyalty it is found that the researches will try to define what loyalty is have significant space. The most basic problem will encountered in those studies is the failure to achieve a shared definition of loyalty because although customer loyalty may be a key variable that explains keeping the customer at hand. It has been discussed in time whether loyalty is an attitude or combination of attitude and behavior.

 According to Jacoby and Keyner(1973), the approach based on behavior, loyalty will the behavioral reaction based on prejudice as the function of psychological processes by the decision maker in the existence of one or more alternative in time. Behavioral approach explained loyalty basing on the criteria including the share in consumption, consumption probability, probability to consume the product again, repeated consumption behavior, and multidirectional consumption behaviors.

According to Solomon et al (2006), the combination of attitude and behavior brand loyalty is a form of repeat purchasing behavior reflecting a conscious decision to continue buying the same brand, for brand loyalty to exist, a pattern of repeat purchase must be accompanied by an underlying positive attitude towards the brand . Sudharshan ( 1995) said that this approach does not include only the past purchasing behaviors and tendencies but also customer attitude and value systems.The customer realizes loyalty in time through repeated consumption of any good or service when the customer has a positive attitude toward the good/service or company providing the good/service.        According to Lewis and Booms (1983) Service quality will reflects the extent to which the delivered level of service matches customer expectations One of the critical tasks of service companies is service quality management. Quality means the degree of excellence in service performance. Consumers perceive the quality of a service by experiencing the consumption process and by comparing the experience with their expectations. Though consumers are co-producers and their participation will affects the quality, service firms cannot blame the customers. Service organizations have to be responsibility of quality performance through an effective strategic framework.

        According to Lewis and Booms( 1983) SERVQUAL is a well-known research instrument for evaluating service quality in stores. SERVQUAL wiil perfectly covers the dimensions that are considered by a customer in evaluating quality of service in stores. SERVQUAL can generally be applied for evaluating service quality in any service sector.

 SERVQUAL deals with five service quality dimensions.

1- Tangibles

2- Reliability

3- Responsiveness

4- Assurance

5- Empathy

        According to Parasuraman et al. (1988) the tangible elements deal with the availability of physical facilities, equipment and personnel. Reliability is the ability of the service provider wiil perform a service dependably and accurately. Responsiveness is concerned with the willingness of service provider to assist customers and deliver prompt services. Assurance means that customers can put their trust in service provider employees and Empathy is individualized care and attention that customer receives from service deliver, Apart from these dimensions the researcher will discussed store image, store loyalty, confidence building and customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Store Loyalty

        Store loyalty exists when a consumer regularly patronizes a particular store that he or she knows likes and trusts the store brand’s products.

        According to Andreas Leverinand Veronica Liljander (1983) This study will investigates the relationship marketing (RM) strategy of a retail bank and examines whether - after its implementation -customer relationships were strengthened through perceived improvements in the banking relationship and consequent loyalty towards the bank. The researcher used regression analysis to find a result. The findings showed that relationship satisfaction was less important as a determinant of loyalty in the more profitable segment.

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