Product Quality and Customer Loyalty: The Case of a Chocolate Production Cooperative, Peru

Abstract

Purpose: The objective was to determine the effect of product quality on customer loyalty in a cooperative that produces chocolate in Peru.   Theoretical framework: The combination of information studied in advance by several authors and with the contribution of the findings presented in this work allows maximizing the knowledge of future researchers who decide to study product quality and customer loyalty together.   Design/methodology/approach: Grounded theory and non-experimental, descriptive-correlational basic design were considered. In addition, a sample of 53 people was considered, of which three were representatives of the cooperative and 50 were customers of the cooperative; the interview and the survey were considered as techniques. The approach considered was a mixed qualitative-quantitative one.    Findings: The qualitative data revealed that the cooperative is interested in improving product quality since it considers the opinion during and after sales, which has allowed it to increase customer loyalty little by little, but it still needs to expand its business since its production is minimal. In the quantitative findings, product quality with customer loyalty (0.842), cognitive loyalty (0.784) and affective loyalty (0.632) maintain a medium to very strong connection since they achieved a Pearson of 0.842. On the other hand, with conative loyalty there is no favorable connection since the sigma was higher than 0.05.    Research, Practical & Social implications: The benefits that the studied cooperative can receive is to know the bottlenecks that are generating that they cannot expand their market and get the loyalty of their customers in the established brand. Customer loyalty can be achieved by offering quality products that specify in the labeling the health benefits of chocolate consumption and the ingredients it contains.    Originality/value: The peculiarity of this work is that it examines selected cooperative that have not been performed in previous works and tests the soundness of the theories used.