Correspondence: Bertil Hultén, Baltic Business School, Kalmar University, Kalmar 391 82, Sweden. Tel: +46 480 49 71 54; Fax: +46 480 49 71 10; E-mail: bertil.hulten@hik.se

¹is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Baltic Business School (BBS) based at Kalmar University, Sweden. His areas of research interest are in relationship marketing and retailing, especially B2C relationships. He has published a number of scientific research papers and research reports. He also has academic work experience with other universities in Scandinavia and North Africa.

Received 10 September 2007; Revised 10 September 2007.

Abstract

Few studies have emphasised a service firm's customer base for segmentation purposes in identifying weak or strong relationships in a consumer mass marketing context of services. The research contributes to an understanding of how high or low levels of trust and of commitment can be used to differentiate customers in terms of active, use the services regularly, and passive, use the services only occasionally. The empirical study was based on a customer sample of a Swedish processing laboratory using direct marketing (DM) and on-line activities as marketing tools. A mail survey (n=4,130) was used and multiple items were applied to seven constructs. A t-test for an independent sample was used to assess whether the two customer groups were statistically different. The results are that active customers differ significantly on 22 of the 27 measured items. Consequently, active customers are more relational, with high levels of trust and of commitment, and passive customers are less relational. A theoretical and managerial implication is to use the chosen constructs (ie indicators) as segmentation variables of a firm's customer base in developing strategies for long-term customer relationships.