زنجیره ی اثرات شخصیت برند و هم نهشتی کاربردی مراحل وفاداری به برند: نقش واسطه گر جنسیت The Chain of Effects from Brand Personality and Functional Congruity to Stages of Brand Loyalty: The Moderating Role of Gender

Introduction For decades, creating good brand relationship with consumers has been the ultimate goal of many businesses especially in the context of marketing and brand management. One of the common strategic approaches in promoting a brand is through the media in order to keep reminding the target consumers about the brand. Even though this approach is still practiced in many emerging economies such as Malaysia, it is less valued by consumers and they keep on switching brands. Therefore, the term “consumer brand loyalty” has been a central attention in marketing, consumer behaviour, and brand management studies as consumer loyalty (i.e., retention) is considered as the currency of the market place (Gopal Das, 2014). However, researchers believe that consumer retention, which is a result of loyalty, can cost five times less than acquiring a new one (Delgado-Ballester & Luis Munuera-Alemán, 2001). Consequently, creating customer brand loyalty by getting the support of branding strategy has gathered momentum among researchers. Previous studies highlighted numerous benefits of building customer brand loyalty with existing customers. For instance, brand loyal customers are inclined to pay premium price, therefore they are less price sensitive (Schiffman, O’Cass, Paladino, & Carlson, 2013) and more engaged in positive word of mouth communication (Schiffman et al., 2013). Furthermore, studies showed that a small increase in customer brand loyalty’s rates can result in a tremendous increase in the firm’s profitability (Gopal Das, 2014). The marketing and consumer behaviour literature has demonstrated that the evaluation of the brand as well as brand attitude is not only a result of the functional facets of the brand but can also be from the symbolic criteria of the brand (Kressmann et al., 2006). According to Oliver (1999), loyalty is engendered through three sequential phases: cognitive loyalty, affective loyalty, and conative loyalty which are all the outcomes of information processing. Each stage of these loyalty facets is effected by different attitudinal factors such as self-image (Kressmann et al., 2006) and self-congruity (Sirgy, Johar, Samli, & Claiborne, 1991). Recently, a small number of researchers investigated and confirmed the impacts of self-image on consumer brand loyalty with most of them considering brand loyalty as a single construct (e.g., Gopal Das, 2014; Kressmann et al., 2006). In order for researchers and brand managers to attain deep insights into how consumer’s brand loyalty is structured and developed, all stages of brand loyalty and its relationships with brand personality and functional congruity should be examined. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, no research has hypothesized the relationship between brand personality and functional congruity and literature lacks in demonstrating the impacts of brand personality and functional congruity on cognitive, affective, and conative loyalties. Furthermore, numerous studies argued that the buying behaviour of consumers vary across genders (Bakewell & Mitchell, 2006), and research also revealed that consumer perception towards the symbolic benefits of brand differ across gender groups, for instance, the symbolic benefits of brand personality between males and females (Gopal Das, 2014; Grohmann, 2009). Therefore, the role of gender requires more investigation in relation to branded products.