Effect of Corporate Brand on Brand Loyalty

Abstract

The new millennium is not just a new beginning; it is a continuation of trends in human behaviour that have been following the trends throughout our country’s history. We have always been living in the world of brands and a brand is a set of perceptions and images that represent a company, product or service. A brand guarantees a quality, evokes an emotion and instils a belongingness. It is built on the elements of confidence, passion, action, security and culture. Company’s ability to maintain its satisfying customer requires an understanding of the consumer buying behaviour, their satisfaction after purchasing the product and eventually the brand loyalty. In this paper a new term called corporate branding is been highlighted. Corporate branding represents an opportunity for organizations to enhance and sustain their distinctiveness through linking corporate characteristics to products and services, thereby, allowing unique synergies to be developed. Brand loyalty is the degree to which consumers are committed to particular brands of goods or services. Corporate branding enables the firms to use the vision and culture of the whole organization explicitly as part of its uniqueness and can increase the firm’s visibility, recognition and reputation to a greater extent than a product brands can. Indian consumers were indifferent in choosing the brand since a lot of close substitutes were available in the market. However, they have changed ever since the India liberalized its economy. Choosing the right brand is difficult enough when there were half a dozen brands and all of these claimed to be the excellent in quality. Marketing managers are interested not only in the product but also the behaviour of the consumers because it gives them the right orientations for product development and positioning. The level of consumer’s satisfaction provides the scope for repeated purchases and brand loyalty that lead to optimum profitability. The study has been carried out based on mobile phone markets. There have been a number of studies regarding corporate branding and brand loyalty in foreign context. Yet there are very limited studies on Indian consumers, hence this study aims to find out the various determinants of corporate branding and how those determinants have an impact on the brand loyalty.