The relationship of service quality, consumer decision factors and brand equity

Quality of service has been a key marketing topic. Branding is one of the interesting topics for study also because branding is a competitive strategy. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship of service quality, consumer decision factors and brand equity; and in hotel industry.; The population of this research is 17 brand name "Five star" and "Four star" hotels in Thailand. There is a survey on service quality, consumer decision factors and brand equity responded to by guests of the hotels. The samples for the study were 370 guests of the hotels. Prior to data collection, a pilot study was conducted. Paired samples t-statistics test method was used to test the differences and similarities of the mean response between service quality expectations and customers' perceived service quality. The research used descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and ANOVA to test the hypotheses.; The results indicate that there was no statistical difference between the expectation and perception of service quality of Thai hotels on all five dimensions. While all of the perception scores were higher than the expectation scores the size of the differences were very small. The results also indicate that there is no relationship between service quality and brand equity. However, the results indicate that there is a relationship between quality perception and consumer decision factors. Furthermore, a relationship was found between quality perception and brand equity in the hotels. In addition, the research found there is a relationship between consumer decision factors and brand equity. Moreover, the research found there is a relationship between service quality, consumer decision factor and brand equity. The contribution is derived from the works of Keller (1993) and the study of Aaker (1991), Aaker & Biel (1993), Howard (1994) and Berry (2000). With some limitations, it is worth suggesting some areas for potentially useful future research.