An exploration study on detecting important factors influencing brand loyalty in retail stores

Article history: Received May 12, 2013 Accepted July 15, 2013 Available online July 2


Introduction
With the growing realization that brand is one of the most valuable intangible assets, branding has changed as a top management priority during the last decade.In fact, during the past few years, there has been a growing competition in global market and branding can be especially important in the retailing industry to affect customer perceptions and drive store choice and loyalty.Runyan and Droge (2008), for instance, presented an extensive review of 20+ years of research on small, independent retailers and investigated on 134 different articles.Ailawadi and Keller (2004) integrated different lessons from branding and retail image research to present a better understanding of how retailers generate their brand images, paying more attention to the role of the manufacturer and private label brand assortment.The other issue on global market is to understand different sources of sustained competitive advantage, which are major areas of research in strategic management.Barney (1991) examined the relationship between firm resources and sustained competitive advantage and discussed different empirical indicators to generate sustained competitive advantagevalue, rareness, imitability, and substitutability.Dolich (1969) explained that there are some congruence relationships between self-image and product brands.
Branding has become a top management priority during the past few years because of the growing realization that brand is one of the most remarkable intangible assets (Elliott and Wattanasuwan, 1998;Levy, 1999).Keller and Lehmann (2006) identified some of the influential work in the branding area, giving insights on different achievements such as brand positioning, brand integration, brand-equity measurement, brand growth, and brand management.They also discussed some existing gaps in the research of branding and brand equity.Turley and Milliman (2000) concentrated on the research accomplished over the years on the impacts of facility-based environmental cues, or "atmospherics", on buyer behavior.They reviewed the pertinent literature by building a comprehensive table of the empirical investigations in this area that focused on the different findings.This summary table showed that atmospheric variables affect a wide variety of consumer evaluations and behaviors.Kwon and Lennon (2009) performed two experiments to disentangle reciprocal relationships between multichannel retailers' offline and online brand images.Their results supported the cross-channel impact of prior offline brand image on online brand beliefs and that of online performance on offline brand beliefs.Consumers' online and offline brand attitudes were impacted by not only brand beliefs from the respective channel but also by beliefs from the other channel.However, strong prior offline brand image was detected to mitigate the effect of online performance on offline brand beliefs in the presence of negative online performance as a way to remove cognitive dissonance.Chaudhuri and Holbrook (2001) investigated the role of brand loyalty by looking into the chain of effects from brand trust and brand influence on brand performance.Their model included productlevel, category-related controls and brand-level controls.They compiled an aggregate data set for 107 brands from three separate surveys of consumers and brand managers.Their results indicated that when the product-and brand-level variables were controlled for, brand trust and brand affect combined to determine purchase loyalty and attitudinal loyalty.

The proposed study
This paper presents an exploration study to find out important factors influencing retail stores selling one of well-known sport shows such as Adidas, Nike, etc. in city of Tehran, Iran.The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale.The population size is determined as follows, where N is the sample size, represents the probability, and e=0.99, the number of sample size is calculated as N=265.We have distributed 265 questionnaire and received 234 ones.The questionnaire consists of 24 questions and we use factor analysis to perform the survey.Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.894, which is well above the minimum acceptable limit of 0.70 and we can confirm the reliability of the questionnaire.
Table 1 demonstrates the summary of basic statistics, which helps us detect unusual variables.As we can observe from the results of Table 1, none of the variables has any biad skewness and there is no need to remove any variable from our survey.In addition, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Samplng (KMO) is about 0.89, which means it is possible to extract factors from this questionnaire.

The results
In this section, we present details of our findings on the implementation of factor analysis summarized in Table 2 as follows,

Table 1
The summary of basic statistics

Table 2
The summary of factor analysis