Efeito da nostalgia do cliente na lealdade à marca pós fusão / aquisição

Abstract

The feeling of nostalgy is present in all individuals and may influence the way we relate to people, objects and services. It is a bittersweet feeling, like a longing for yesterday, which tends to evoke in people fond memories of the past. For marketing researchers, this concept proves to be important in shaping the structures of consumer preferences and, therefore, it has been studied a lot since the 1990s. This dissertation explores this feeling in a context of mergers and acquisitions in the banking sector, where a company, by merging with another company, extinguishes the previous brand, thus affecting the attitude towards the prevailing and extinct brand, and hence the customer loyalty of the extinct brand. The latter may also be affected by the effect arising from the cost of change. In this context, the main purpose of the author is to study the effect of the consumers nostalgic feeling as to their behavior and loyalty after the extinction of a brand as a result of a merger/acquisition process and the proposition and test of an explanatory model of the relationships between those constructs. Based on a critical analysis of the models proposed by different authors, theoretical reflections on the concept of nostalgy and other related constructs, a theoretical model was developed. Information was collected from customers who have experienced a merger process and maintained relationships with the company resulting from the process and tested and refined by the technique of structural equation modeling PLS-SEM, under the aspects of reliability and validity. The results show that there is an effect from the nostalgic feeling of customers on their attitude toward the extinct brand, which is prevailing in the merger/acquisition process, as well as the positive influence of the cost of changes to build their brand loyalty. The results obtained allow us to conclude that they contribute to the expansion of the theoretical framework of marketing regarding the subject of this research, by proposing and validating a comprehensive model that complements the existing studies on the subject and simultaneously seeks to fill some gaps.