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Abstract
In a competitive motorbike industry where consumers can choose from a vast variety of collection of early mover motorbike brands, it is compulsory for marketers of late movers to encourage brand loyalty in order to create enduring consumer-brand relationships and build market share. This study concentrated on determining the intensity to which the three elemental dimensions of brand romance, namely brand pleasure, brand arousal and brand dominance conclude brand loyalty among motorbike users in District Haripur, Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa, Pakistan. A questionnaire based survey was conducted with 260 respondents. Results show a significant impact of brand romance and its three dimensions on the brand loyalty of late mover motorbike brands. Marketers of late movers in motorbike industry are suggested to enhance brand romance to achieve emotional attachments between brand and consumers in order to develop the brand loyalty.
Key words: Brand Romance, Brand Arousal, Brand Pleasure, Brand Dominance, Brand Loyalty, Late Movers, Motorbike Brands
1.0 Introduction:
Aaker (1991), argues brand loyalty as an essential part of brand equity. It is an important concept in marketing productivity programs and also for evaluation of the companies' performance (Keller, 1993). Brand loyalty can be seen as regular consumers buying the same brand again and again (Belaid & Temessek, 2011). Brand loyalty is a repetitive purchase of a brand along with the commitment to buy the same brand (Jacoby, 1971). Brand loyalty has been studied by different authors from different perspectives. Earlier conception of brand loyalty was behavioral (Cunningham, 1956; Tucker, 1964) and was defined as the relative frequency of brand purchase (Sheth, 1968) and measured the number of times the brand was bought in purchases compared to other brands of the same product category for some time. Psychologically, it refers to consumers focused state of mind. Day (1976) argued attitude as measures to brand loyalty, then (Jacoby, 1971; Jacoby & Chestnut, 1978a; Jacoby & Kyner, 1973; Sheth & Park, 1974) and Dick and Basu (1994), induced attitudes as a psychological indicator of brand loyalty, which can store consumer preferences leading loyal behavior.
It was claimed that consumers could result in the emergence of feelings of emotional attachment to the brand (Round & Roper, 2012), which in turn promotes long-term relationships with these brands (Long-Tolbert & Gammoh, 2012)....