3. Examining Swedish market, how does ikea cope with challenges, arising while realization of consumer loyalty strategies?

First, according to Curry (2000), customers classifying approach can help companies visualize, analyze, and improve the behavior and profitability of customers and this has been supported by the case of Sweden. As shown in the previous study, without such an approach, a company cannot focus on a certain group of customers when implementing customer loyalty strategy and thus the efficiency of customer loyalty strategy cannot be high. To solve this problem, some programs have to be adopted as a membership system mentioned in the case of Sweden. Through these programs, customers’ information, preference can be recorded and form basis of companies’ customer loyalty strategy. Besides that, as mentioned in Torres-Moraga and his partners’ (Torres-Moraga et al., 2008) article, loyalty to brand and products should be researched separately and this has been proved to be helpful for companies in the case of Sweden. Therefore, Swedish companies should view brand and products as two stages when considering customer loyalty. This is the second problem that needs to pay attention on it. Especially for the companies that have a range of products, it is better to record customers’ attitudes towards each product. The analysis of this can help to understand customers’ preference and thus help to improve customers’ attitudes and loyalty to the brand.

Last but not least, Swedish customers play an important role when Swedish company promote to new customers. Existing customers’ word-of-mouth can have a significant effect on new customers’ attitudes towards thecompany. Therefore, company should communicate more with existing customers and make them stand on the side of company.

5.2. Recommendations for further study

Because the approach used in this thesis is a personal interview, the interview result may be not that objective. Therefore, in a further study, it is better to conduct more interviews and survey among customers can better help to collect data and information. Moreover, observation on the method that the company treats customers is a useful approach to understand company’s customer loyalty strategy. Therefore, in the further study, the method of observation can be adopted to collect data and information. Besides that, as mentioned in Hofstede’s (2004) book, there are five dimensions of national culture, which are Power distance, Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty avoidance and Long-term Orientation. In this thesis, the factors of communication and conflicts handling are only studied within the field of customer relationship and loyalty. The impacts of national culture are not concerned in this study. Therefore, in a further study, the impact of culture is a important dimension of this topic.

Appendix

1. Table1. Definitions of customer loyalty (Sällberg, 2004)

Source	Definition
Kumar et.al,1992	Behavioural attraction to a brand
East et.al,1995	Proportion of total spending, a consumer’s loyalty percentage
Mittal and Lassar,1998	Continuing customers
Dick and Basu, 1994	Favourable correspondence between relative attitude and repeat patronage
Kendrick,1998	Purchase frequency and amount spent per order or visit
Liljander and strandvik, 1995	Purchase behaviour

2. Basic Customer Pyramid (Sällberg, 2004)

3. Standard Customer Pyramid (Sällberg, 2004)