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Choong Lyong Ha: Doctoral Candidate at the University of Texas at Arlington, Texas, USA
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: The author would like to express true thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their keen and constructive comments.
Introduction
In recent competitive business environments, consumers have been exposed to a proliferation of brand choice alternatives. Fisher (1985) states "Marketers battling to keep competitors from grabbing off customers complain that there just doesn't seem to be as much brand loyalty around as there used to be." This complaint means that it is not easy to obtain and maintain consumers' loyalty to a company's product, since there are many forces driving consumers to be unloyal (e.g., competitions, consumers' thirst for variety, etc).
In order for managers to cope with the forces of disloyalty among consumers, they need to have an accurate method to measure and predict brand loyalty. However, it has seemed impossible to obtain an objective and general measurement of brand loyalty, because brand loyalty has been differently defined and operationalized by a number of scholars. The diverse definition and operationalization of brand loyalty has been in part due to the various aspects of brand loyalty (e.g. behavioral and attitudinal brand loyalty).
Jacoby and Chestnut (1978) state "If brand loyalty is ever to be managed, not just measured, it will have to be elaborated in a much more detailed description of cognitive activities rather than focusing only on behavioral aspects of brand loyalty (e.g., repeat purchase)". The statement made by Jacoby and Chestnut (1978) implies that previous studies of brand loyalty have mostly focussed on the measurement issue of brand loyalty by investigating repeat purchase of a brand. Cognitive aspects of brand loyalty make it possible to predict what purchase behavior would be followed by a certain cognitive response. For example, a bad attitude toward a certain brand would result in switching behavior of purchase.
Until now, there have been few studies of how several antecedents of behavioral brand loyalty are inter-related. If the antecedents are integrated to measure and predict brand loyalty, the measurement will be more stable over time and accurate. The purpose of this paper is to integrate three aspects of brand loyalty (cognitive response, subjective norm and purchase behavior), and to investigate the relationships among several antecedents...