Brand Loyalty
Brand Antecedents of true BrAnd LoyALty
Jooyoung Kim, Jon d. Morris, and Joffre swait ABSTRACT: We examine a model of six latent constructs and propose that true brand loyalty can be explained as a result of five distinct antecedents: brand credibility, affective brand conviction, cognitive brand conviction, attitude strength, and brand commitment. Data from experimental conditions with manipulations of eight product classes and two involvement levels lend support for the proposed model, demonstrating that brand loyalty can be considered as truly loyal only when mediated by a high degree of affective and cognitive brand conviction, and attitude strength. Advertising and marketing implications for the relationships among the six constructs under different manipulation conditions are discussed.
How to make consumers more loyal to a brand is one of the important questions marketers face. Growing interests and practices in customer relationship management (CRM) in recent years clearly reflect the importance of consumer loyalty in marketing. Brand loyalty can provide both consumers and companies essential benefits. For consumers, a brand toward which they feel loyal can act as a signal of achieved expectation. Because of the familiar and favorable signal that a brand sends, consumers buy the brand with more comfort, believing the brand will meet their expectations. This comfort would mostly come from the credibility of the brand established from past experiences the consumers have had with it, either directly or indirectly. For companies, customer loyalty enhances brand equity by lowering vulnerability to competitive marketing actions, increasing margins, increasing marketing communication effectiveness, and possibly generating more brand licensing or extension opportunities (Keller 1998). A study by Bain & Co. (Reichheld and Teal 2001) shows that a 5% increase in customer loyalty can increase a company’s profitability by 40 to 95%, and an increase in customer
Jooyoung Kim, Jon d. Morris, and Joffre swait ABSTRACT: We examine a model of six latent constructs and propose that true brand loyalty can be explained as a result of five distinct antecedents: brand credibility, affective brand conviction, cognitive brand conviction, attitude strength, and brand commitment. Data from experimental conditions with manipulations of eight product classes and two involvement levels lend support for the proposed model, demonstrating that brand loyalty can be considered as truly loyal only when mediated by a high degree of affective and cognitive brand conviction, and attitude strength. Advertising and marketing implications for the relationships among the six constructs under different manipulation conditions are discussed.
How to make consumers more loyal to a brand is one of the important questions marketers face. Growing interests and practices in customer relationship management (CRM) in recent years clearly reflect the importance of consumer loyalty in marketing. Brand loyalty can provide both consumers and companies essential benefits. For consumers, a brand toward which they feel loyal can act as a signal of achieved expectation. Because of the familiar and favorable signal that a brand sends, consumers buy the brand with more comfort, believing the brand will meet their expectations. This comfort would mostly come from the credibility of the brand established from past experiences the consumers have had with it, either directly or indirectly. For companies, customer loyalty enhances brand equity by lowering vulnerability to competitive marketing actions, increasing margins, increasing marketing communication effectiveness, and possibly generating more brand licensing or extension opportunities (Keller 1998). A study by Bain & Co. (Reichheld and Teal 2001) shows that a 5% increase in customer loyalty can increase a company’s profitability by 40 to 95%, and an increase in customer