Smartphone Brand Loyalty and Consumer Heterogeneity

Abstract

Research Question: The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of sales promotion and advertisement on brand association and brand loyalty of Samsung smartphones via the analysis of gender and age as moderating variables. Motivation: The motivation for this study emerges from the fact that the effect of sales promotion and advertisement on brand loyalty have not considered the effects of consumer heterogeneity such as age and gender. Idea: The core idea of this study is to verify the effect of monetary promotion, non-monetary promotion, perceived advertising, and individual attitude towards brand association and brand loyalty through the moderate effects of age and gender. Data: This research was carried out in South Jakarta, Indonesia by employing a simple random sampling method and questionnaires distributed to 100 respondents. Tools: Data were analyzed by using Partial Least Square Structural Equation (PLS-SEM) method and the SmartPLS 3.0 software. The PLS-SEM was performed with a two-step approach by analyzing the outer and inner model, afterwards followed by a multi-group analysis to analyze moderating effects of both variables of gender and age. Findings: The findings indicate that non-monetary promotion and individual attitude towards advertising significantly affect brand association while brand association significantly affects brand loyalty. Gender and age-specific analyses indicate that gender differences significantly moderate the influence of individual attitude towards advertising on brand association and age differences significantly moderate the effect of monetary promotion on brand association. Moreover, women, men, younger and older consumers behave differently towards sales promotion. Contribution: This study contributes to the literature by adding empirical evidences in terms of how different consumers respond to sales promotion and advertising as well as further effects on brand association and brand loyalty.