Enhancing Brand Loyalty Through Customer Value And Brand Identification In The UK Automobile Industry Essay.

This template is designed to guide you through writing the assignment for MD4064. It needs to be tailored to suit your particular topic and how you want to research it. You should refer to the lecture notes as well as the hand-outs you were provided with as well as your own reading.

Background of the Research

In the modern era of marketing techniques it has become quintessential for the business organizations to determine new and innovative techniques through which the needs and wants of the customers can be satisfied. Hence the companies are searching for avenues through developing brand loyalty through the creation of consumer value and brand identification (Tomczak et al., 2018). The previous and traditional research works have focused on the issue that the main sources of value creation are land, labor and capital however, it is still an unexplained fact that how the product with the same quality, efficiency and feature can be priced three times than that of the competitor. Here arises the concept of brand identification and brand value. In several marketplaces brand develops a unique identity and associates with a product at the same time it is connected with a specific target population (Pearson, 2016). This affects the consumer’s dignity and self-esteem in a positive manner. This is the underlying reason for which a customer prefers to pay higher prices. On the other hand, when a customer can recognize a brand from a specific genre of product and that is because the product provides the customer with the expected value then the customer becomes satisfied with the product. This prolonged customer satisfaction provides the company with a loyal customer base which signifies whatever be the circumstances the customer will buy that specific product only (Nyadzayo and Khajehzadeh, 2016). This research work will focus on identifying how the automobile industry of United Kingdom can predict brand loyalty through creating of consumer value and brand identification.

The broader aim of this research work is to identify how the automobile industry of United Kingdom can enhance its brand loyalty through the creation of brand value to the customers and a unique brand identification.

The objectives of the research work can be stated as follows,

• To identify the role of brand loyalty in enhancing business activities
• To identify the factors affecting brand loyalty
• To develop a broader understanding about the brand identification
• To develop a broader understanding about consumer value
• To determine how consumer value and brand identification can contribute in developing brand identity.

The research questions can be summarized as follows,

• What is the role of brad loyalty in enhancing the business activities?
• What are the factors affecting brand loyalty?
• What is brand identification?
• What is consumer value?
• How consumer value and brand identification can enhance brand loyalty?

Brand loyalty is characterized as a pattern of consumer behavior where the consumers develop a commitment towards a specific product or service and make repeat purchase over time. Different organizations make use of creative strategies of marketing for instance loyalty program or customer reward and incentives like free samples for developing brand loyalty (Kapferer, 2017).

In an extensively competitive marketplace saturated with established and reputed brands, companies make use of different techniques for creating brand loyalty (Kandampully et al., 2015). It is quite evident that a loyal customer will purchase the brand irrespective of the price level. Companies within the automobile industry of United Kingdom generally follow the shopping trends and patterns of the customers and develop relationship with the customers as well through engaging designated people and providing effective customer service (Vomberg et al., 2015).

Objectives of the Research

Customer trends can help a brand or the organization to enhance its brand loyalty (Govers and Go, 2016). The customer trends are simply the behaviors and habits practiced by the consumers on a regular basis. Companies generally collect data regarding the spending habits of the consumers so as to develop a better understanding of how they would be able to market their products more efficiently.

Brand loyalty has always been a widely researched issue in the field of social science. The researchers have identified a number of factors that affect brand loyalty. These factors include trust, perceived value of the customers and customer satisfaction (Smilansky, 2017). It is a noteworthy fact that most of these studies have been conducted from the aspect of economic scenario and B2B framework. Under this scenario the customers are faced with numerous alternative brads from which they will be needed to select their own choice (Hennigs et al., 2015). At this point of time importance is given to the brand identity and how this identity affects the customer satisfaction and plays a crucial role in developing brand loyalty. As argued by Stobart (2016), customers generally reflect and reinforce their identities with the help of brand identification and relationships which are built along with it. As a result it is recommended that when the customers high value the quality of a brand and it is easy for the competitors to imitate the products of the firm it becomes necessary for the firms to develop a strong brand identity which helps to develop a stronger brand equity and in turn make the customers loyal to the brand (Kotler, 2015). There are authors who have argued that the social identity of a customer may also possess significant impact over the loyalty of the customer.

The concept of brand identity states that an organization should hold itself responsible for creating a distinguishable product which will possess certain unique characteristics. It is the process through which an organization identifies itself in the market. At the same point of time brand identification also represents how an organization is willing to be perceived in the market and communicating its identity to the customers through activities like branding and marketing. Following Keiningham et al., (205), it can be stated that a brand is unique only because of its identity.  Brand identity focuses on the following factors like brand culture, brad vision, positioning, brand personality, relationships and presentations of the brand.

Factors Affecting Brand Loyalty

Brand identity can also be categorized as a bundle of functional and mental associations of the customers with a brand. Associations are certainly not the reasons to buy but it provides familiarity and differentiation which in turn is not replicable (Loureiro et al., 2017).

Consumer value is defined as the concept of marketing that makes an attempt to analyze the level of satisfaction received by a customer from a purchase. On an added notion, it specifically attempts to analyze whether the consumer will become a repeat purchaser given the ongoing business strategy of the firm (Zhang et al., 2017). On the part of the business entities it can be stated that they analyze the customer value in order to strengthen their customer base and thereby market their products more effectively (Heding et al., 2015).

Summarizing the entire chapter will yield the fact that brand loyalty is largely dependent on various factors like customer satisfaction, perceived value of the customers, brand equity, brad recognition and many more. However, it is a matter of fact that in order to enhance the brand loyalty it is necessary to enhance customer satisfaction and that can be done by enhancing the aforesaid factors. Therefore there is a positive relationship between brand loyalty and consumer value and brand identification.

In order to carry out a research work effectively and efficiently, number of philosophical techniques can be used in order to achieve the desired research outcome. For the preset research work the researcher will strictly follow a pragmatic research approach. Pragmatic research approach will take into consideration a mixed research method through which the researcher will obtain the research outcome (Taylor et al., 2015). The research wok is focused on determining how the automobile industry of the United Kingdom can enhance brand loyalty through customer value and customer brad identification. The pragmatic research approach is a mixture of positivism and interpretivism research philosophies.

The positivism research approach will take into account facts and figures, relevant data and statistics available for conducting the research. On the other hand, the interpretivism research approach is only concerned about the responses obtained from the market players of the automobile industry (Lewis, 2015). The feedback of these people can certainly be considered in the research work to validate whether brand loyalty can be enhanced through customer brand identification and customer value. This research work will take into account both of this aspects primary and secondary both data will be analyzed. The parametric variables and non-parametric variable will also be considered for substantiating the underlying hypothesis.

Consumer Value

Mainly three types of research logics are used for carrying out a research work which are namely inductive, deductive and abductive. The inductive research logic is used when a new theory or concept is developed while carrying out the research work (Lewis, 2015). In this case information is obtained from numerous different sources while new theories and concepts are also developed during the conduction of the research. Under this approach the researcher becomes able to deduce the theories behind the new concept. More appropriately the inductive research method is more concerned about developing new ideas and theories.

Under the deductive research logic all the theories and models used during the research work have been used previously and through using these theories the researcher achieves the desired result (Flick, 2015). Different models and theories are used in this research logic for deducing the actual research outcome. This clearly signifies the fact that under deductive research logic the researcher will previously possess a well-designed hypothesis and different theories and models will be used to substantiate that hypothesis.

For the present research work deductive research logic will be used and various models and theories provided by the researchers will be used for hypothesis validation.

There are mainly two types of research approach namely quantitative research and qualitative research. The qualitative research approach is nothing but exploratory research method which is used to develop an understanding regarding the opinion, emotional attachments and feedbacks of the people towards the research problem (Silverman, 2016). The foremost advantage of using this method is that it provides a crisp understanding about the research issue which in turn helps to develop a research hypothesis for further quantitative research.

The quantitative research method mainly collects data and transforms into numerical figures. These numerical figures are then analyzed to develop an understanding about the chose population on which the research is being conducted.

The primary data will be collected through questionnaire survey. The people within the automobile industry will be provided with questionnaires containing multiple choice questions and will be asked to provide feedbacks. Four managers of different automobile companies will also be interviewed for obtaining the qualitative data as well. In this context it is important to mention that 135 people who work within the industry will be asked to participate in the primary research work.

The secondary data will be collected through analyzing relevant literature, journal articles available relevant to the research topic, company annual reports, new paper articles and websites.

Research Logic

Moreover, as the research work possesses a predesigned hypothesis and the number of participants in the primary survey is already determined a non-probability simple random sampling will be used for this research work.

The primary data will be analyzed through the help of statistical packages like SPSS or Eviews. Primarily the quantitative data will be entered into MS Excel and will also be filtered. After sorting and filtering the data it will be imported into SPSS and the analysis will be performed through descriptive statistics for obtaining significant results. Due to large number of respondents the researcher will only collect their response through multiple choice questions as obtaining descriptive answers will be difficult.

The qualitative data will be analyzed through thematic analysis. Detailed information collected will be collected and after designing specific themes the qualitative data will be analyzed.

Obtaining primary information can be difficult for the researcher as the respondents may not be willing to provide their feedbacks. On the other hand, limited financial funding can also be a barrier for the researcher to conduct the research work effectively and efficiently.

While conducting a research work it is mandatory to abide by certain ethical considerations (Vaioleti, 2016). In this context it can be stated that the researcher will not force a respondent to provide feedback. The data collected during the research work be kept in confidence. The data will not be published without the consent of the respondent. The data that will be used in the research will certainly be collected from trusted sources and no case studies or journals will be used which are older than 5 years.

Reference List

Flick, U., 2015. Introducing research methodology: A beginner's guide to doing a research project. Sage.

Govers, R. and Go, F., 2016. Place branding: Glocal, virtual and physical identities, constructed, imagined and experienced. Springer.

Heding, T., Knudtzen, C.F. and Bjerre, M., 2015. Brand management: Research, theory and practice. Routledge.

Hennigs, N., Wiedmann, K.P., Klarmann, C. and Behrens, S., 2015. The complexity of value in the luxury industry: From consumers’ individual value perception to luxury consumption. International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, 43(10/11), pp.922-939.

Kandampully, J., Zhang, T. and Bilgihan, A., 2015. Customer loyalty: a review and future directions with a special focus on the hospitality industry. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 27(3), pp.379-414.

Kapferer, J.N., 2017. Managing luxury brands. In Advances in Luxury Brand Management (pp. 235-249). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Keiningham, T.L., Frennea, C.M., Aksoy, L., Buoye, A. and Mittal, V., 2015. A five-component customer commitment model: implications for repurchase intentions in goods and services industries. Journal of Service Research, 18(4), pp.433-450.

Kotler, P., 2015. Framework for marketing management. Pearson Education India.

Lewis, S., 2015. Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches. Health promotion practice, 16(4), pp.473-475.

Loureiro, S.M.C., Sarmento, E.M. and Le Bellego, G., 2017. The effect of corporate brand reputation on brand attachment and brand loyalty: Automobile sector. Cogent Business & Management, 4(1), p.1360031.

Nyadzayo, M.W. and Khajehzadeh, S., 2016. The antecedents of customer loyalty: A moderated mediation model of customer relationship management quality and brand image. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 30, pp.262-270.

Pearson, S., 2016. Building brands directly: creating business value from customer relationships. Springer.

Silverman, D. ed., 2016. Qualitative research. Sage.

Smilansky, S., 2017. Experiential marketing: A practical guide to interactive brand experiences. Kogan Page Publishers.

Stobart, P. ed., 2016. Brand power. Springer.

Taylor, S.J., Bogdan, R. and DeVault, M., 2015. Introduction to qualitative research methods: A guidebook and resource. John Wiley & Sons.

Tomczak, T., Reinecke, S. and Kuss, A., 2018. Introduction. In Strategic Marketing (pp. 1-18). Springer Gabler, Wiesbaden.

Vaioleti, T.M., 2016. Talanoa research methodology: A developing position on Pacific research. Waikato Journal of Education, 12(1).

Vomberg, A., Homburg, C. and Bornemann, T., 2015. Talented people and strong brands: The contribution of human capital and brand equity to firm value. Strategic Management Journal, 36(13), pp.2122-2131.

Zhang, S.S., van Doorn, J. and Leeflang, P.S., 2014. Does the importance of value, brand and relationship equity for customer loyalty differ between Eastern and Western cultures?. International business review, 23(1), pp.284-292.