Influences of Loyalty Program Design on Preferences and Motives for Reward Pursuit: A Cross Cultural Comparison

Loyalty programs are playing an increasingly important role in developing relationships, stimulating product and service usage, and retaining consumers. Yet, as Wiebenga and Fennis (2013) observe in their recent Journal of Consumer Psychology article, theoretical and managerial insights into how information feedbacks of depicting reward pursuit process affect consumer motivation at various stages of loyalty programs are very limited. A second knowledge gap pertains to the lack of culture-specific insights into loyalty program study (Beck, Chapman, and Palmatier 2015). It is therefore reasonable to expect loyalty program designs to reflect different cultural tendencies, especially since consumers’ value perceptions and choices are known to vary significantly from culture to culture (e.g., Chan, Wan, and Sin 2009; Lalwani and Shavitt 2013; Kim, Kulow, and Kramer 2014). The proposed research addresses these knowledge gaps by demonstrating distinct patterns of consumers’ reward preference and reward motive in loyalty program across cultures. By contrasting reward preference and reward motive of Western, individualist versus Eastern, collectivist consumers, this research reveals theoretical and managerial insights into how consumers from the respective cultures adapt their views to specific features of loyalty programs.