Marketing strategic transformation: From customer satisfaction, customer loyalty to surpassing customer orientation

Customer satisfaction is a fundamental idea of marketing management, whose logic is customer satisfaction causing customer purchase, and customer purchase leading to market share maintaining or increasing. The extended model of customer loyalty expands the theoretical logic of customer satisfaction, indicating that four elements (i.e., customer trust, customer satisfaction, customer cognizance value and switching cost) together determine the customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is an important factor for customer repurchase, and customer repurchase ensures or strengthens marketing share position of firms. The essence of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty is "customer orientation", which has limitations and terms to apply. "Surpassing customer orientation", namely creating demands, making regulations and leading customers, is more competitive. The marketing strategic position model of surpassing customer orientation offers a tool for firms to choose marketing strategies on different industrial developing stages and competing locations. Finally, there are cases of "surpassing customer orientation".