Spanish Customer Satisfaction Indices by Cumulative Panel Data.

Resumen

In this paper, we present a new theoretical representation of the Consumer Satisfaction Index (CSI) based on Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). We use panel data collected by an automotive magazine to apply our approach and assess the applicability in the field of marketing by formulating a competitive strategy in the Spanish automobile industry. The basic structure of the CSI is based upon well established theories and approaches to customer satisfaction (see Fornell 1992; Fornell et al., 1996). The structure based upon these theories consists of a number of latent factors, each of which is operationalised by multiple measures. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new way of representing the structure of Spanish Consumer Satisfaction (CS) in the automobile industry to study and compare the implications of its representations. We will discuss that CSI is a global evaluation constructed on the basis of its particular component evaluations. Apart from building a new way of representing the structure of CS, this work tries to correct for the bias produced by the particular method of calculus employed by the magazine.