The adoption and effectiveness of loyalty programs in retailing

Loyalty programs have widely appeared in several sectors, with the aim of enhancing customer loyalty and profitability. This dissertation examines which role loyalty programs can play in the company's marketing-mix, with a special focus on retailing. The dissertation consists of three independent projects. The first project studies the determinants of retailers' decision to adopt loyalty programs and the effectiveness of loyalty programs by means of a retailer survey. The second project studies the effects of loyalty programs on behavioral loyalty by using market-wide panel data and correcting for the two-sided causality between loyalty program membership and behavioral loyalty. The third project focuses on the effects of loyalty program rewards on (future) customer behavior and customer lifetime value using loyalty program data from an individual retail company.