“Customer Loyalty Can Make or Break a Brand.” How Far Do You Agree with This Statement?

Thus, companies seek to strengthen customer loyalty. Brand loyalty is considered to tilt the consumer to purchase the package / product specific brand (Jacoby and Chestnut, 1978). Later, Oliver (1997) defined loyalty as "a deeply held commitment to REBUY or repatronize preferred product / service consistently in the future, thereby causing repetitive same-brand or same brand set purchasing, despite situational influences and marketing activities, which would result in causing switching behavior "(p. 34). This conceptual definition covers two different aspects of loyalty: the behavioral. This is consistent with an integrated conceptual framework proposed by Dick and Basu (1994), that customer loyalty is regarded as a "power relationship between the relative position of the individual and repeat

So in order to maintain the consumer loyalty with the brand it is necessary to make a good relationship with the consumer as it is the first key of building good image of brand in the mind of the

Customer loyalty is much harder to obtain that customer service satisfaction. The most important first step is to satisfy the customer by meeting their expectations. Customers only give a company one chance and if they aren’t satisfied they will not do business with that company again, as well as tell others of their experience. The next step would be to exceed the customer’s expectations. If a business goes above and beyond to assist the customer they begin to build loyalty. The next step is to truly surprise the customer. In order to dominate the marketplace the company must find a way to make them selves stand out with their product or service, accompanied with phenomenal customer service. Once this has been done customer satisfaction and loyalty will be gained. “Acquiring a new customer can cost four or five times more than keeping a current customer” (Bestmark, 2013). So it’s essential to keep the current customer’s happy and coming back for more.

Brand loyalty is a contributing factor for competitive advantage in the domestic airline industry. Businesses in mature industries spend a lot of time and money developing their brand. Virgin Blue has a culture of helpfulness and irreverence and the “flying kangaroo” symbol is central to the Qantas brand Hill et al. (2007, p. 116). Brand loyalty makes it harder for new entrants to enter the market.

Macdonald & Sharp, 2003 states that it is a strong influencer in the buying decision consideration process, as most of the consumers prefer buying brands they are aware and would like to be confident when making the purchase decision. The cost of acquiring customers is a significant expense for most businesses so higher brand awareness will help draw potential customers with little or no costs. Retaining customers is an even harder process than the former so strong brand loyalty among the customers will help sustain the business on a long term basis. Popular brands often use tools like newsletters, promotions, and satisfaction surveys to stay in touch with their existing to pool of customers in order to maintain brand awareness among consumers. Brands should also focus on research related to aided and unaided brand recall as it can help bring down marketing costs significantly while increasing the management’s understanding of the business (Holden, 1993). Aided recall looks at what thoughts/feelings the customer associates with the brand while unaided recall looks at what brands of a specific product category the customer can think of without any prompts. The former helps marketing professionals to focus on building brand awareness to attract new customers whereas the latter focuses on improving the brand image among existing customers. Simply put, the more people are aware of the brand

In today’s highly competitive business markets, a consumer’s loyalty to a brand often adds reassurance to the company’s stable and lasting position in the marketing world. As the new year continues to unravel, brands must maintain strong marketing strategies in order to keep their current buyers interested as well as capture the eye of new buyers. Brand loyalty after all, is the consumer’s conscious and unconscious decision, expressed through intention or behavior, to repurchase products from a brand continually. It occurs when the consumer perceives that the brand offers the right product features, image, or level of quality at the right price. One of the industry’s most successful

The research results showed that product quality was not the strongest factor that led to brand loyalty but market inertia and that product quality was more likely to lead

In addition to that Lin (2010) also specifies loyalconsumerspurchase more products and loyal consumers are less-price sensitive and pay less attention to competitors’ advertising. Therefore, when taking in to consideration of above mentioned benefits, it clearly represents the positive impacts of brand loyalty towards a firm. Furthermore Khraim (2011) also confirms that the brand loyalty is vital for afirm to make sure that its brand is kept in the minds of consumers and avoidconsumers from switching to other brands. There are many forces drawing consumers away such as competition, customers’ thirst for variety, etc. hence obtaining and maintaining loyalty for a particular brand is not an easy task thus marketers should clearly understand how loyalty factors can affect consumer buying behavior in the marketplace and find out ways and means to gain brand loyalty towards their productsKhraim (2011).

Customers buy what they know, they buy same brands as their parents bought when they were little or same brands people they trust bought because they know and trust them and they know what to expect, (Rousseau & Venter,

Customer loyalty is an important element for the companies for being successful in the competitive world. Therefore, companies always try to increase the number of loyal customers and the degree of their customers’ loyalty. For obtaining this, the elements, which cause a decrease in customer loyalty, must be learned carefully. The reasons for the decrease in customer loyalty are: (Coroglu, 2002)

The concept of Customer Loyalty can be seen in the work of Deming and his TQM model but the modern more detailed definition was derived from the work of Storbacka, Strandvik, and Grönroos (1994) in the area of service quality models. Relationship Marketing places great emphasis on customer lifetime value. The conventional wisdom suggests that loyal customers are the most profitable but recent work by Heiner Evanschitsky and John Glanfield, both now at Aston Business School suggests that this may not always be the case. To what extent do you believe customer loyalty should influence marketing strategy?

The main concept of brand loyalty has been approached from three different factors which is behavioral, attitudinal and composite loyalty. The researchers have their own assumption or known as behavioral view which they assume that the loyalty of a guest toward a brand is based on the repeat transactions occur. The study of O’Malley (1988) show that this approach provides a more realistic picture on how well the brand is performing compare to other competitors. However, this approach have been criticized because unable to differentiate between spurious loyalty and true loyalty.

With more and more suppliers in the market place, customers have more diversified options regarding products, prices and shopping places. Therefore, marketing departments gradually come up with ideas on retaining current customers which brings in the concept of customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is the ongoing process of customers buying products or services from a specific company (Gustavsson, 2005). For most companies, retaining customers costs less than attracting new ones and also reduces expenses on promoting products. In order to reach this aim, the organization constantly increases customer loyalty by carrying out loyalty programs to reward the remaining customers for repeated transactions (Donnelly, 2009).

The behavior in which a consumer keeps buying a product time and again instead of buying products from other competitive companies is called Brand Loyalty. Brand loyalty can often be termed as Customer Loyalty, Brand Commitment, Product Loyalty etc. Brand Loyalty is seen among consumers when they realize that the product is better than the other products that are available in the market. This affinity of a consumer towards a particular product is considered to be brand loyalty. Although, this consumer behavior is not limited to a simple repetition of a purchase, there is also a psychological reasoning behind the consumers’ affinity towards behavior.

A similar research Loyalty in Retail: A strategic success or a management failure states that successful loyalty programs do not exist in vacuum. The loyalty cards provided by the retailers are compared to the hammer. Just as a hammer does not build a house, a loyalty card does not build customer loyalty. Customer loyalty has been used as a strategic approach in increasing customer value and thus providing a good customer experience but it doesn’t work alone. A brand value has to be created in which involvement of the staff, quality of the products, knowledge about the customers etc. are required.