Brand Loyalty Essay

Good staff will leave a great impression towards customer especially in hotel mangement department. Our priority is our customers and meeting up their expectations, desire, other than serve them. Consequently, it creates challenges for our resort in maintaining high levels of service, awareness of customer expectations and improvement in services and facillities. Customer satisfaction is the leading criterion for determining the quality of the product/service that is actually delivered to customers by the accompanying servicing (Vavra, 1997). In a simple word , customer satisfaction is important for corporate survival. It costs about five times as much in time, money and resources to attract a new customer as it does to retain an existing customer (Naumann, 1995). A lot of complaint regarding this matter, as example there is no follow up from customer services and reception. Based on booking.com , agoda.com and tripadvisor.com complaints are mostly about our less skillful staff which slow respond, service, unfriendly and some of the staff does not smile towards the customer. Since there is a lot of our customer came from other country, communication skills become quite a big problem. Accoding to the reviews, they need to explain for few times to get our staff understand and it seems to be kind of bothering and annoying. Some of the review written state our staff as

Firstly, to start with it is important to understand what is Customer loyalty? Loyalty can be explained as an attitudinal or behavior. According to Mark, Grahame & Kathy (2003): “Loyalty is something that consumers may demonstrate their interest to brands, services, stores, product categories. Here, we use the term customer loyalty as opposed to brand loyalty; this is to emphasize that loyalty is a feature of people, rather than something inherent in brands (Mark, Grahame & Kathy, 2003).” To explain it further Customer loyalty is something where consumer or customer likes or prefer to buy

From an organisations point of view, especially in the short term, it would seem more appropriate to concentrate on behavioural loyalty because this is reflected in sales behaviour. Such behaviour is easily measured compared to components of attitudinal loyalty and matches key managerial performance indicators. Attitudinal measures may also not reflect consumer’s actions when the consumer is confronted with real choice. However, from a longer term view and especially from a CRM viewpoint, it is also vitally important to measure attitudinal loyalty. Attitudinal loyalty is composed of commitment and trust in the brand and/or organisation which will have impacts on sales both in the short and longer term. This type of loyalty is more likely to be an indicator of the potential longer term relationships that will be possible with given customers. Attitudinal loyalty is also likely to have influence on word of mouth and customer advocacy which may lead to indirect impacts on longer term sales or on costs of servicing

The definition of Brand Loyalty is when consumers become committed to your brand and make repeat purchases over time. Brand loyalty is a result of consumer behavior and is affected by a persons preferences. Loyal customers will consistently purchase products from their preferred brands, regardless of convenience or price. Companies will often use different marketing strategies to cultivate loyal customers, be it is through loyalty programs (i.e. rewards programs) or trials and incentives (ex. samples and free gifts). (Investopedia)

Brand loyalty is when customer purchasing behavior is repetitive and customers become committed to a certain brand over a long period. Customers can become loyal to a type of brand regardless of pricing and other factors contributing to the success of a business such as location and convenience. Businesses use loyalty programs such as loyalty rewards programs to encourage loyal customers.

Service quality has become a main idea for student academic to study in many industries especially in hospitality industry. In Wilson et al (2008), service can be discussed in the terms of below four characteristics:

Since brand loyalty constitute of attitudes and behavior to settle on a brand. Attribution theory looks into illustrating the driving force behind decision making. For a brand loyalist to be, multiple mental deductions must be undertaken to get to the most sequentially logical conclusion based on situation at hand.

The hotel may be seen as a reliable supplier. Customers may have increased loyalty based on service recovery in the case of service failure, and may spread the positive reviews about the hotel via word of mouth.

In the Travel & Tourism industry the success rate of the business depends on the quality of service and whether the customers are satisfied by the services

The attitudinal definition of loyalty implies that loyalty is a state of mind. By this definition, a customer is "loyal" to a brand or a company if they have a positive, preferential attitude toward it. They like the company, its products or its brands, and they therefore prefer to buy from it, rather than from the company's competitors. It is all about a consumer having an emotional attachment to a brand, liking it more than others, and even loving it.

Brand loyalty is one of the hottest subjects in marketing today. Customer’s brand loyalty play an significant role in company’s development. There are a range of definitions of this term, but in this essay ‘brand loyalty’ refers to people being willing to buy products from the same manufacturer repeatedly rather than from other suppliers. More and more companies are tried to investing in optimizing the benefits of their brand externally and internally. Various researchers (Ballester and Aleman, 1999) refer that brand loyalty generates benefits like substantial entry barriers to competitors, better ability to respond to competitive threats, greater sales and revenues and the customers’ lower sensitivity to marketing efforts of competitors. The purpose of this essay is to help the entrepreneur to explore which factor can have important influence for customer’s brand loyalty. Clearly a study of this type is inevitably restricted by various constrains. Because customer’s brand loyalty has been influenced by many factors we can not illustrate all of them. The essay is structured as follows. The first section presents an example on the highly successful Apple company, analyzing the company’s approaches to encourage ‘brand loyalty’ among their customers. The second part focuses on factors distinguish which factors can have a significant influence on customer, make customers to try out products instead of remaining loyalty to brand.

Service quality has a significant effect on repurchase intention, through a direct link between service quality, Customer Satisfaction, and behavioral intentions Among the various behavioral intentions, considerable emphasis has been placed on the impact of service quality in determining repeat purchase, which the more satisfied the customers are the greater is their retention and customer loyalty, while service quality influences a customer’s subsequent behaviour, intentions and preferences. When a customer chooses a provider that provides service quality that meets or exceeds his or her expectations, he or she is more likely to choose the same provider again. In addition, the hospitality’s reputation plays an important role in determination of purchase, repeated purchase, and customer loyalty (Choi et al., 2004, Yongyui, Cronin, Jones and Farquhar, 2003, Brady and Hult, 2000).

The concept of Brand loyalty is defined in terms of 6 necessary and sufficient conditions. These conditions are as follows: -

Customer satisfaction is arising as a big challenge in the hospitality industry. Brands are introducing and accepting in every good economy, which give an indication that customers are not only giving importance to tangible products and services but they also look for the self-esteem behind the scene.(Sutton, 2003). Dr. Mary Jones from University of Bath (2009) put light to this particular issue by saying that customer retention is profitable for a company, but it needs quality services, superior values and satisfaction to customer loyalty with brand. Brand loyalty is necessary to get place in the customer’s mind and can only be gained by communicating the brand’s philosophy into the mind of customers through good repute.(Simmon,1999).

The English word “hotel” derives from the French word hôtel (coming from hôte meaning host). It