Research Gateway

Abstract

Brand loyalty is undoubtedly one of the most sought after topic for marketers all around the world. In an era where the market is flooded with similar products from different brands having more or less similar functionalities, consumers are often spoilt for choices. In fact, in order to achieve a competitive advantage, marketers must harp mostly on consumer psychology so as to attract them and retain them for lifetime. Brand loyalty can be defined as the extent of consumer faithfulness towards a specific brand and this faithfulness is expressed through repeat purchases and other positive behaviors such as word of mouth advocacy, irrespective of the marketing pressures generated by the other competing brands (Kotler & Keller, 2006; Kotler, et al., 2008). Consumer brand loyalty and relationship model was first propounded by S Fournier (1998) wherein the relationship with brands was compared to human relations. This led to the development of the immensely popular BRQ scale (Fournier 1998). Since then, consumer brand relationships have been studied extensively with several new dimensions being added to the brand consumer relations. However, many conundrums do exist. This study aims to establish a model or construct that re-interprets the consumer brand relationship. A questionnaire has been developed on the basis of Brand Attributes (Based on 7Ps of marketing), Brand Differentiation, Brand Relevance, Brand Esteem, Brand Knowledge, Brand Experience, Brand Association, Brand Trust and Brand Salience. As the aim of the research is to subsequently investigate the impact of the aforementioned variables on Brand Loyalty, Loyalty has been kept as the outcome variable in the questionnaire. This questionnaire had been distributed among customers and the data was collected. The analysis had been done so as to examine the most significant factors affecting brand loyalty has been extracted and the efficiency of these factors either in isolation or in combination has been evaluated.