What drives freight transportation customer loyalty? Diverging marketing approaches for the air freight express industry

Going beyond the traditional business to consumer air transport passenger perspective, this paper examines what we can learn from combining transaction marketing (TM) and relationship marketing (RM) orientations in respect to customer loyalty in the context of business to business (B2B) freight transportation markets. We model and examine post-transactional air freight express (integrator) customer behavior of 170 manufacturing companies and our results suggest that both TM and RM orientations influence customer loyalty as TM has a positive direct and indirect impact on loyalty due an mediating effect on RM outweighing potential dark side effects of RM on customer loyalty. This indicates that transaction-based marketing can support a relationship structure with the aim to nurture customer loyalty in B2B freight markets. In contrast to theoretical notions and contradictions between simultaneous competition/cooperation and interdependence/dependence of customers and service providers, we show that managers of freight and logistics companies should embrace the coexistence of TM and RM approaches and develop strategies that value long-standing transactional customers as they provide opportunities to create effective customized solutions.