Dual commitment: Evidence from an emerging country perspective

Despite the fact that commitment is a well-established and important concept in the marketing literature, our understanding of the concept of customer commitment remains limited. A possible reason for this pertains to the notion of dual commitment. Dual commitment stems from a buying situation where a service delivered is dependent on the collaboration between two or more service providers. Under these circumstances, the question arises whether commitment should be managed on an aggregated level, or on the level of each of the contributing service providers. The mobile service industry is a typical example hereof, where the service is the end-result of collaboration between a mobile handset provider on the one hand, and a mobile network service provider on the other. In such a situation, two questions arise: Should a customer?s commitment be managed on a comprehensive level or, secondly, will a customer?s commitment towards a mobile handset provider differ from their commitment towards the actual mobile network service provider?Against this background, this study investigated the management of customer commitment from a dual commitment perspective. A quantitative approach was used to analyse the perceptions of South African respondents belonging to the Generation Y cohort. During the research, respondents were introduced to two questionnaires: the first questionnaire pertained to the management of commitment towards the mobile handset provider (MHP), whereas the second questionnaire addressed commitment towards the mobile network service provider (MNSP). Both the questionnaires focused on three dependent variables (affective, normative and calculative commitment), with trust, satisfaction, communication, shared values and reputation being the independent variables. The data were analysed in SPSS version 25, and regression analyses were used to assess the statistical significance of the hypothesised relationships.The empirical results revealed a number of interesting findings. Firstly, the study questions the existence of dual customer commitment in the South African telecommunications industry. The reason is that striking similarities were found in the ways in which commitment are managed from the two service providers investigated. In addition, in terms of the management of commitment on affective, calculative, and normative levels, several similarities were also found. This study?s results therefore contradict those reported in the existing literature, prompting the question whether the unique characteristics of respondents from emerging markets, such as South Africa, could have influenced the results.