The One- or Two- Way Route? : A quantitative study on the effects of one-way and two-way marketing communication on brand loyalty among members of loyalty programs in the beauty industry.

Abstract: Marketing communication has been a widely researched area throughout recent years, due to the emergence of the internet. The different marketing communication channels used by customer loyalty programs in order to reach members efficiently, must be adapted to fit the consumer’s demand in order to deliver the message of the marketing actions. The marketing communication matrix claims that marketing communication can be divided into two perspectives, where one-way marketing communication is the communication actions that creates a monologue from a firm, and two-way marketing communication is the communicative action that creates a dialogue between companies and their loyal members. In order to test this, the communication channels for one-way communication have been identified as direct emails, text messages and catalogue send outs. The drivers of two-way communication have been further identified as tangible rewards, interpersonal communication and social media interaction. Thereby, the purpose of this study has been to test the effects of one-way marketing communication and two-way marketing communication on attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty, among members of a loyalty program within the beauty industry. In addition, the effects of relationship quality have also been tested on brand loyalty. The findings have been applied foranalysis on the big cosmetics chain SEPHORA on their operations in Scandinavia. Therefore, the population has been found within Sweden and Denmark.Prior research has found that standardized, non-personalized marketing communication, which is often conducted via emails, led to brand loyalty. However, previous studies have also found that many of these emails remain unopened in the receiver’s inbox, and the content of the marketing action does not fulfill its marketing purpose. In addition, other existing literature claim that dialogical communication between firms and their customers increase customer satisfaction. A gap in the existing knowledge has therefore been found, as there are no studies conducted that focus on the effects of dialogical marketing communication on brand loyalty. In order to fulfill the purpose of this study, a quantitative research method has been utilized. Therefore, a web-based survey has been sent to active Facebook users, that had joined different beauty communities on this social media platform.Theregression analyses showed that the drivers of one-way marketing communication that had positive effects on attitudinal loyalty were direct emails and text messages. Further, the drivers of two-way marketing communication that had positive effects on attitudinal loyalty were interpersonal communication and social media interaction. Direct emails was the only driver of one-way communication that had a positive effect on behavioral loyalty, and other positive effects found was the drivers of two-way marketing communication, identified as interpersonal communication and social media interaction, on behavioral loyalty. The only driver of relationship quality that was found to have a positive effect on the two loyalty behaviors was relationship commitment. The conclusion of the study is that marketing communication in general has positive effects on both attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty. However, as some drivers of marketing communication did not have any effect on brand loyalty, it is evident that firms must adapt their communication channels to fit their customer segments and to emerging technology. Practical recommendations were also presented for SEPHORA Scandinavia, which proposed that networks and communities should be the future targets in order to find the profitable customers.