Shaping customer brand loyalty during the pandemic: The role of brand credibility, value congruence, experience, identification, and engagement

Abstract

While insight into consumer brand engagement, experience, and identification is rapidly developing, little remains known regarding the association of these, and related, concepts, as therefore explored in this article. Drawing on social identity theory and service‐dominant‐logic, this study develops and tests a model that explores the effect of customers' brand credibility, ‐value congruence, and ‐experience on their brand identification, and its subsequent effect on their brand advocacy, ‐attachment, and ‐loyalty. We also examine the potentially moderating role of consumers' engagement in affecting these relationships. To explore these issues, we collected tourist‐based survey data. To analyze the data, we used confirmatory factor analysis, followed by structural equation modeling. The findings reveal that brand value congruence, credibility, and experience exercise significant positive effects on customers' brand identification, which, in turn, impact their brand advocacy, attachment, and loyalty. Further, brand engagement is shown to moderate the association of these factors. We conclude by outlining key theoretical/practical implications that arise from this research.

Does Supplementary Information Add Value to Functional Food? Evidence from a Choice Experiment in China

“…The significant positive effect of habitual purchase brands indicates that respondents are more likely to purchase egg brands that they are familiar with and purchase frequently in daily life. This finding is consistent with previous research in China [ 6 , 35 ] and many other countries [ 45 , 49 ] that trust in one brand could be accumulated over time through regular purchases.…”

Source Credibility Theory: SME Hospitality Sector Blog Posting During the Covid-19 Pandemic

“…This finding is in line with the previous findings. Past studies also found that credibility on brand creates higher levels of customer loyalty (Alam et al, 2012;Rather et al, 2022). Moreover, Hypothesis six investigated the mediation effect of unverified information sharing between credibility and loyalty.…”

“…Other recent study found that credibility have significant positive effect on customers' brand identification which in turn positively effect loyalty. (Rather et al, 2022).Thus, loyalty plays an important role in shaping a positive relationship between consumers and companies. In this study, the loyalty factor refers to customer loyalty gained from SMEs through their blog posts.…”

Consumer Engagement with Self-Driving Cars: A Theory of Planned Behavior-Informed Perspective

“…Relatedly, while the TPB suggests that consumers' behavioral intent is directly affected by their PBC (Ajzen, 1991;Hollebeek et al, 2022a), as the present SDC-based findings corroborate, consumers' level of SDC engagement is also found to mediate this association. That is, PBC exhibits both a direct and indirect effect on the user's intent to purchase an SDC (i.e., as mediated via engagement), revealing more nuanced insight into these dynamics (Rather et al, 2022;Villagra et al, 2021). This result makes sense, as the higher one's perceived control when driving an SDC, the greater one's expected (e.g., cognitive/behavioral) resource investment in interacting with the SDC, thus boosting the individual's SDC engagement (Kumar et al, 2019;Hollebeek et al, 2019).…”