Predicting smartphone brand loyalty: Consumer value and consumer-brand identification perspectives
Introduction
With the proliferation of the competing brands in the marketplace, keeping consumers loyal is an imperative for marketing managers (Jones & Sasser, 1995). Researchers have devoted a considerable amount of effort investigating this issue. They have advocated that the notion of brand loyalty should be extended from patronage behavior to psychological commitment (Oliver, 1999), and both attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty contribute to pro-brand consequences. Attitudinal loyalty may be positively associated with patronage intention, word-of-mouth, acceptance of premium price, and resistance to counter-persuasion, while behavioral loyalty may lead to greater market share and increased profitability (Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2001; Shankar, Smith, & Rangaswamy, 2003).
Standing on various theoretical grounds, researchers have investigated the reasons for brand loyalty, but two viewpoints have received greater amount of attention. The first is consumer value theory, which claims that value perception is the pivotal predictor of brand loyalty (Kim, Gupta, & Koh, 2011; Sweeney & Soutar, 2001). Consumers remain loyal if they perceive superior value from a given brand (Hansen, Beitelspacher, & Deitz, 2013). The second viewpoint is the identification approach, which puts consumer-brand identification (hereafter referred to as brand identification) as the antecedent of brand loyalty (Bhattacharya & Sen, 2003; Tuškej, Golob, & Podnar, 2013). Consumers stick with a given brand once they identify themselves with the attributes of the brand (Stokburger-Sauer, Ratneshwar, & Sen, 2012). Some studies have further contended that both viewpoints may positively result in brand trust and then brand loyalty (He, Li, & Harris, 2012), supporting claims that these are the foundations of brand loyalty.
Although researchers generally recognize the predictive power of consumer value and brand identification, managers may face a dilemma about resource allocation because the two viewpoints offer different guidelines for business practice. Strategies derived from consumer value theory encourage managers to emphasize product development and to communicate the advantages of the product attributes to consumers (Karjaluoto, Jayawardhena, Leppäniemi, & Pihlström, 2012), whereas strategies derived from the identification approach may drive managers to create an attractive brand identity and to organize a community for intimate consumer-brand and consumer–consumer interactions (Stokburger-Sauer et al., 2012). As managers may have to reconcile these marketing campaigns to generate synergies, it is crucial to differentiate the effects of consumer value and consumer-brand identification on brand loyalty. Therefore, an integrated analysis with loyalty determinants should aid in understanding the determinant priority and the allocation of marketing resources.
In addition, studies on brand loyalty have argued for the necessity of taking individual heterogeneity into consideration (Floh, Zauner, Koller, & Rusch, 2014). Model validation and/or hypotheses testing with entire samples may suffer from aggregation bias, and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns may not be realized as expected. Compared with mass marketing, targeted marketing might generate revenues and profits more efficiently. As such, individual heterogeneity needs to be considered in the analyses of brand loyalty. A moderation specification of individual heterogeneity can help managers tailor better loyalty programs and enrich existing knowledge. A review of prior studies reveals that age and gender are two typical variables of individual heterogeneity (Venkatesh & Morris, 2000), and this study investigates whether and how the effects of loyalty determinants differ across age and gender categories.
To sum up, this study has two main objectives:
- 1.
To understand the relative influence of determinants (i.e., value and identification) on brand loyalty.
- 2.
To understand the moderating effects of individual heterogeneity (i.e., age and gender) on the relationships between value/identification and loyalty.
To achieve the two objectives, this study uses the smartphone industry in Taiwan as the research context. In Taiwan, smartphones have overwhelmed feature phones in use, and hold 71% of the mobile phone market in terms of supply in the third quarter of 2012 (Information Data Center, 2012). A recent survey from Google (2013) reported that the penetration rate of smartphones was 51% in the first quarter of 2013, an increase of 19% over the same period in 2012. Given that smartphones have growth potential in Taiwan and brands are a crucial factor in smartphone marketing (Arruda-Filho, Cabusas, & Dholakia, 2010), the research context is appropriate. The results of this study may provide strategic suggestions for smartphone marketing.
The rest of this article proceeds as follows. Firstly, the literature review describes the two theoretical viewpoints and illuminates their underlying concepts. Then, Section 3 introduces the research model and proposes the hypotheses regarding the direct and moderating effects on brand loyalty. The research method is described in Section 4, including sampling, measurement development, and the examination of common method variance. Section 5 reports the empirical results. Lastly, the discussion of results, theoretical and managerial implications, limitations, and directions for further research are presented in Section 6 and the conclusions are in Section 7.
Section snippets
Consumer value theory
Consumer value is the cornerstone of a successful transaction, and it motivates consumers to purchase repeatedly (Holbrook, 1994). The expectation disconfirmation paradigm suggests that once consumers have satisfactory experience with a product, they have better value expectations and tend to repurchase the same product in the future instead of switching (Anderson & Srinivasan, 2003). Yang and Petersson (2004) indicated that value is a superordinate goal and positively regulates loyalty
The specification of research model
The research model is illustrated in Fig. 1. Brand loyalty is defined as consumers' favorable attitude toward a brand that results in intentions to repurchase and recommend (Anderson & Srinivasan, 2003). To understand the relative importance of the determinants of brand loyalty, this study specifies that consumer value and brand identification directly influence brand loyalty. Consumer value is the consumer's overall evaluation of the utility of a product/brand (Zeithaml, 1988), including
Measures
There were five sets of measures developed for the major constructs in this study. The measures for the three value types were adopted from Kim et al.'s (2011) comprehensive work, and each value had four items extracted from corresponding types (e.g., social value was measured with two items from social self-image expression and two from social relationship support) to make the measures as balanced as possible. The measure for brand identification was taken from Stokburger-Sauer et al. (2012)
Results
The PLS method, which is variance-based structural equation modeling and is a distribution-free technique (Hair, Sarstedt, Ringle, & Mena, 2012), was used to analyze the data. The results were produced using the SmartPLS 2.0 M3 package (Ringle, Wende, & Will, 2005).
Discussion of the results
While consumer value and brand identification might dominate the formation of brand loyalty, there is little understanding regarding their relative importance. The roles of age and gender differences in influencing these relationships are less examined. For these reasons, this study intends to know the determinant priority of brand loyalty and takes age and gender differences into account. The two theories are expected to be elaborated through consumer segmentation, and the results may provide
Conclusions
Based on consumer value theory and brand identification approach, this study identified functional value, emotional value, social value, and brand identification as the determinants of brand loyalty. To understand what the priority of the four loyalty determinants is and how the relationships between the four loyalty determinants and brand loyalty change in varied age and gender, the research model of this study was tested in the context of smartphone consumption with a surveyed sample of 157
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