Overall, of the research propositions:
A podcast listener’s exchange outcome satisfaction has a positive influence on attitudinal loyalty, more than any of the individual dimensions of satisfaction alone.
A podcast listener’s exchange outcome satisfaction has a positive influence on behavioral loyalty, more than any of the individual dimensions of satisfaction alone.
A podcast listener’s gender, age, or education level will not affect his or her loyalty, either attitudinal or behavioral.
none are supported. Exchange outcome satisfaction (a combination of information, social exchange, and recreation satisfaction) does not lead to attitudinal or behavioral loyalty with higher consistency than any of its components do alone in or in groups of two. Furthermore, while age and education level did not have a significant impact on loyalty levels, gender did, with males much more likely to be loyal than females.
Information satisfaction and recreation satisfaction were shown to be both necessary and sufficient for producing attitudinal and behavioral loyalty while social exchange satisfaction was shown to have a small but noticeable impact. In light of these findings, the exchange outcome model of satisfaction presented by Hsu et al. (2013) is not a good explanation of the relationship between satisfaction and loyalty in podcasting.
Furthermore, for the most part, the antecedents for attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty
were the same or very similar. This is in contrast to the findings of Hsu et al., who found that exchange outcome satisfaction results in attitudinal but not behavioral loyalty.
When survey respondents were segmented by gender, being male was an antecedent that consistently appeared in both necessary and sufficient causal recipes, while being female did not. When respondents were segmented by age and education level, high or low levels of these antecedents did not appear to have a significant effect on loyalty and only caused consistency values to rise negligible amounts.
6.2 Discussion
The results of the present research have four meaningful implications for podcast content providers.
First has to do with the impact of social exchange satisfaction. Currently, podcasters spend huge amounts of time, energy and money (in the form of full time, dedicated staff) on their social media presence; in fact, for many podcasts, it is their primary form of advertising and promotion. The results, however, imply that this is perhaps not the most effective use of resources; listeners do not appear to care about interaction with other listeners, nor do they appear to care about how their feedback affects the content of the podcast to any meaningful degree. Thus, devoting some resources allocated to social media presence to other, more pressing issues may be prudent.
Second, the presence of either information satisfaction or recreation satisfaction is necessary and sufficient to result in attitudinal loyalty 90% of the time, as well as for behavioral loyalty with lower consistency. Podcast listeners may only listen for one reason, either to get information or be entertained, and thus podcasters looking to tailor content to listeners can
keep this in mind and provide content accordingly.
Moreover, the necessary and sufficient conditions for behavioral loyalty and attitudinal loyalty are largely the same. Thus, in contrast to blogs, podcasts do not need to change their strategy in order to cultivate both attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty.
Furthermore, age and gender do not appear to have an effect on what is required to result in loyalty, either attitudinal or behavioral. For podcasters choosing advertisers, this information is invaluable. Unlike magazine readers or television program viewers, podcast listeners are not united by an age group or gender, but instead are attracted by and united by information satisfaction and recreation satisfaction alone. This information is important for podcasters looking to attract listeners, and means that content providers should focus on serving an informational or recreational niche rather than a demographic segment.
Last, overall, the listening audience of this podcast is highly satisfied and highly loyal. In many cases, over 50% of survey respondents indicated that they “strongly agreed” with statements indicated satisfaction (all three dimensions). The takeaway from this is that podcasts offer advertisers a very unique opportunity; podcast listeners might not be as numerous as consumers of other media, like a TV show or a newspaper, but they are, for the most part, all very dedicated and very loyal listeners. They often feel a relationship with the content provider and are willing to go out of their way to buy from advertisers merely as a way to support the podcast that they like. Still perceived as a fringe medium by many advertisers, only a limited number of companies are willing to advertise on podcasts, but it appears it is time to rethink this paradigm.
6.3 Limitations and opportunities for further research
The present research is limited in several ways. First, all survey respondents were listeners to a single podcast, and thus results may be specific to the podcast, the genre, et cetera. Further research could examine how different factors such as duration, content, genre and so on affect podcast satisfaction and loyalty.
Furthermore, all survey respondents were listeners of a podcast who were familiar with the social media presence of the podcast and who voluntarily spent time taking a survey. Thus, these people may have been a self-selecting group of listeners satisfied and or loyal enough to check the podcast’s facebook. It is then possible that the sample does not necessarily reflect the listening population at large. In the future, similar research could be designed in such a way to target customers that listen regularly as well as those who do not, by, for example, examine the comment and rating section of iTunes.
Also related to the way in which the survey was conducted and the nature of those who responded, a large group (approaching, or in some cases exceeding half) of survey respondents indicated that they “strongly agreed” with all the statements regarding attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty. Thus, without listeners that exhibited a full range of degrees of loyalty, data analysis was difficult and did not provide as much insight as desired. Further research could target listeners that are both loyal and disloyal and analyze the differences between their respective satisfaction levels.
While the present research addresses the correlation between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in podcasting, it does not address the antecedents of customer satisfaction, nor does it address the correlation between customer loyalty and profitability. In order to understand podcasting, both of these are important research areas and could be the subject of
future research.