The empirical study of CRM: Consumer‐company identification and purchase intention in the direct selling industry

The purpose of this paper is to address the research issue of how companies manage their consumers' identification to compete effectively in intensely competitive market places. Drawing on theories of social identity and organizational identification, this study proposes that favorable consumer purchase intentions often result from the consumer‐company identification (C‐C identification) which depends on several identity judgments like identity prestige and identity attractiveness.

A research model and 13 hypotheses are derived in this study. LISREL models are employed to identify the validity of the entire model and data are collected from ten direct selling companies.

The results of empirical analysis show that identity judgments positively affect C‐C identification and the degree of C‐C identification positively influences consumer purchase intentions. The moderating effects of identity trustworthiness and embeddedness have mild influences on the relationship between identification and purchase intentions.

This study confirms that encouraging identification has not only been identified as a good employee retention strategy in organization management but also a good customer retention strategy in marketing management.

This study intends to go one step further to empirically test the viability of the C‐C identification model that is lack of empirical supported.