Brand Loyalty

Kitchen (2010) states that retailers should focus on building a customer relationship marketing in order to build a brand loyalty of their customers in order to promote their repetitive purchasing behaviour. He further mentions that some consumers use the same retail outlet or purchase the same brand of product in most occasions. This leads to a loyalty either to a particular store or brand thus store or brand loyalty.

There are several reasons for basing customer loyalty either on brand or the store which are as follows:

Kotler (2003) states that some customers are loyal to stores due to the monopoly position of the stores as they have no other alternatives for their shopping decisions. This leads to a compulsory brand loyalty where the retailers enjoy loyalty to their stores, but not often to their brand names which is not usually assumed to be a long-term loyalty by their customers.

Inertia loyalty is another example of loyalty to specific brand names where customers remain loyal to certain brand names due to the level of satisfaction they get from it, therefore, do not seek other alternatives as they do not wish to try something new. This type of loyalty is a loyalty to brand names rather than the stores which usually leads to relatively longer term loyalty by customers. In this type of loyalty, customers usually follow the same type of brand names wherever they go.

Lancaster et al (2002) mention about convenience loyalty where customers tend to stick to their local retailers due to convenience and comfort. This is usually referred as casual loyalty, but does not tend to be a long-term loyalty by customers. However, in the case of this dissertation, this type of brand loyalty does not apply or suit the branding strategies of the high street luxury brand fashion products.

Klein (2007) states about price loyalty where customers do not think other alternatives offer value for money, therefore, tend to stick to the usual brand of products they regularly use. This type of loyalty also tends to be long-term as long as the company keeps adding value to its products in order to maintain the long-term loyalty of the customers.

References

• Kitchen, PJ, 2010, A Reader in Marketing Communications, Taylor & Francis
• Klein, G, 2007, Strategic Marketing, GRIN Verlag
• Lancaster, G, Massingham, L & Ashford, R, 2002, “Essentials of Marketing”, fourth edition, McGraw-Hill