Assalamu’alaikum and ohayou minna-san.
How are you guys? Today, I’ve posted my third paper which has been published last month (Jan 2018). This paper explored previous literature and designed a summary of previous studies that examined the influence of the brand management’s elements on brand loyalty.
Abstract:
Brand loyalty and brand trust are known to be the fundamental aspect of brand management. Brand loyalty is important to many companies as it increases their profit as well as market share. Customers tend to choose the brand which they had put their trust and continue using the similar brand rather than taking risks by purchasing a new and unfamiliar brand. Thus, brand trust also plays an important role in influencing the behavior of customers, especially during their decision making process. A summary of the literature review has been designed in this paper, which was retrieved from the previous studies (from the year 1998 to 2016). Even though several factors have been examined separately in the previous researches, too little attention is focusing on examining the combined effects of the brand management’s elements towards the brand loyalty, especially with the presence of the brand trust as the mediating variable. Thus, this paper has been written in attempting to understand the concept of brand management, which includes its significance, dimensions, and the factors that influence brand loyalty.
Introduction:
Brand loyalty plays an important role to the firms as the loyal customers tend to repeatedly spend more on the brand. They are not only buying the chosen product, but also different products within the similar brand [1]. Brand loyalty can be defined as the commitment of customers towards the brand with the action of repeating purchase in the future [2]. Due to the presence of numerous brand in the market, it is important for the marketers to build trust with their customers in order to retain them.
Brand trust plays an important role in the decision-making process as customers are willing to rely on the strength of the brand in order to understand the as-stated purpose of the brand [3]. Once the customers are satisfied with the services offered by the companies, their attitude toward the companies will change. They tend to stay loyal to the product brand that suits their preferences [4]. Therefore, it is a tough competitive battle to capture and retain such customers. This is because the relationship between the loyal customer and brand has been engaged for a long time [5]. This engagement will help in generating more profits to the companies as it costs six times more to gain new customers than it does to retain the existing customers. This will finally increase the market share of the companies [6].
Besides that, the fierce competition among companies in the business environment has urged them to build a strong and long-lasting relationship with their customers. Due to this phenomenon, companies are seeking many ways to maintain their relationship with the customers. However, retaining the existing customers is not easy. For example, customers do not satisfy with the late delivery despite the low quality of the product [7]. Currently, the presence of various choices of product brands in the market has increased the choice of customers’ selection. This phenomenon has forced companies to embed an excellent value on their products to make their products differ from their competitors [8]. Moreover, when customers get value for their money spent, they will experience the full satisfaction towards the product brands and there will be no reason for them to change from the existing brand to other brands [9]. This indicates the importance of brand value in understanding the behavior of customers. However, focusing mainly on the brand value alone will not assure that the customers will remain loyal to the companies as other factors also can influence the customer behaviour [6]. Customer perceptions toward the brand will also influence their purchase pattern as they will gather information and distinguish the brand first before deciding to choose and purchase the desired brand of the product [10]. This will create a positive feeling or good impression about the brand.
A study conducted by Kuikka and Laukkanen [2] recommended a mediating variable to be studied together in order to explain the direct and indirect effect of predictors towards the criterion through the mediator. Their research approach was supported by Malik, Naeem and Munawar [11] who claimed that the additional variable of the mediator will increase the extensive explanation of the relationship between the independent variables and dependent variable. In addition, Nsairi and Khadraoui [12] explained about the extension of the theoretical framework on the brand loyalty relationships by integrating the brand trust as an additional variable that mediates the brand loyalty relationships, which was supported by Hsu [13] who acknowledged the mediating effect of brand trust between the quality and customer intention. To detail up the matter, previous researchers has pointed out that the brand trust has shown the significant relationship with the brand loyalty [10, 14].
On the other hand, in the previous studies, the brand trust is acknowledged to be a mediator between the product quality and brand loyalty [15, 16]; service quality and brand loyalty [17]; brand value and brand loyalty [18]; brand image and brand loyalty [19], which have been conducted in different studies. Yet, the integrating effect of brand trust on the relationship between the product quality, brand service quality, brand value, brand image and brand loyalty is still anecdotal. Therefore, this paper tend to connect the theoretical gap by further investigating the existence of brand trust in explaining the brand loyalty relationships as suggested by Malik et al. [11] and agreed by MacKinnon [20] to investigate how the trust that is built on a brand will interfere and change the relationship between the predictor and criterion.
In addition, the goal of this paper is to develop a more rigorous understanding of the mediating role of brand trust in the relationship between the brand management’s elements and brand loyalty. Henceforth, the outcomes of this paper will help many companies to understand the combined effects of these elements with the influence of brand trust on the brand loyalty in a single model. In light of this, this paper intends to fill the empirical gap by examining the combined effect of these four brand management’s elements towards the brand loyalty with the presence of brand trust as the mediator. Thus, the mediator role of brand trust in the previous studies [19, 21] that is used to control the relationships in the customer brand loyalty will be further discussed in the next section.
Literature review:
Many researchers have studied on the brand loyalty to get a better understanding of the customer behavior. It can help companies in increasing their profits and market share coverage [6]. Historically, the study of brand trust on the topic of customer behavior has been conducted since the 1990s [22]. Many researchers are examining the influence of brand trust towards the customer behaviour such as customer brand loyalty as the antecedent factors [10, 23, 24]. However, there are a limited number of studies focus on mediating role of brand trust in the relationship between the brand management’s elements and customer brand loyalty [19].
Although the studies on brand trust have existed a long time ago as stated in the literature, researchers fail to point out the other roles of brand trust other than being an antecedent of brand loyalty [23, 25]. Brand trust is believed to have a role of mediator between the brand management’s elements (product quality, brand service quality, brand value and brand image) and customer brand loyalty [26]. This study differs from the previous research in three ways. Firstly, researchers only examine the combined effect of product quality, brand value and brand image [27, 28] and the combined effect of brand service quality, brand value and brand image [29]. However, there is still a lack of study being done in measuring the combined effect of product quality, brand service quality, brand value and brand image. Therefore, this paper will provides further insight into the combined effect of these elements in brand management toward customer brand loyalty in a single model.
Secondly, in the previous studies, many researchers have examined the brand trust as the independent variable of customer brand loyalty [10, 14, 23]. In regard to this, limited studies examined the other roles of brand trust [11] that can help marketers and practitioners to better understand the behaviour of their customers. For that reason, this paper will examine the mediating role of brand trust in the relationship between the brand management’s elements and customer brand loyalty. Thirdly, most of the previous studies explored and measured the influence of the combined effects of these brand management’s elements and brand trust towards customer brand loyalty separately [24, 28, 30]. There is no study has been conducted to examine both of these relationships in a single model. Therefore, to close the loop, this study intends to understand the concept of brand management’s elements and its influence on brand loyalty with the presence of brand trust which is shown in... [cont.]
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# Don’t mistake silence for weakness. Smart people don’t plan big moves out loud.
Love,
Dr SAA
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