The Influence Of Consumers' Values And Marketing Strategies On Consumers' Brand Loyalty Intention

In this age of competition, marketers are striving to intensify their customers'brand loyalty to secure a comfortable long-term position in the market-place. Brand loyalty is thought to be an important concept for marketing practitioners. It is influenced by many factors and there are a great number of articles concerning the influencing factors. However, in the literature of influencing factors of brand loyalty, there is nearly no one conducted in different cultural backgrounds. Therefore, the current study aims to enrich the study. By reviewing the influencing factors of brand loyalty, this paper tries to examine the influence of consumers'values and marketing strategies on brand loyalty intention in the contexts of American and Chinese cultures.America and China are highly dissimilar in cultures. The cultural difference would result in different values and responses to marketing strategies for American and Chinese consumers, thus lead to different brand loyalty intentions. In this paper, consumers'values were subdivided into values to time, risk and self concept and marketing strategies were subdivided into advertisements and price promotion. Based on the above analysis, five hypotheses concerning the relationship between influencing factors and brand loyalty intentions were proposed with the consideration of cultural difference. The empirical study investigated the hypotheses and tested the results in a scientific way.The results showed that, because of cultural difference, the Americans and the Chinese had different values to risk and self concept, held different opinions about advertisements, and therefore exhibited different levels of brand loyalty intentions. The concrete findings are listed as follows:⑴Americans less concern about risk aversion will have negative influence on their brand loyalty intention; Chinese more concern about risk aversion will have positive influence on their brand loyalty intention.⑵Americans more concern about self concept will have positive influence on their brand loyalty intention; Chinese less concern about self concept will have negative influence on their brand loyalty intention.⑶Advertisements featuring independence and distinctiveness would increase the brand loyalty intention of the Americans; Advertisements featuring family and community would increase the brand loyalty intention of the Chinese. The other two hypotheses were not proved. They are:⑷Americans more concern about time pressure will have positive influence on their brand loyalty intention; Chinese less concern about time pressure will have negative influence on their brand loyalty intention.⑸Price promotion would decrease the brand loyalty intention of both the American and the Chinese with the latter being decreased much more.Although the size of samples used in current research is not very large, the findings, to certain degree, still prove that cultural difference does have impacts on consumers'brand loyalty intentions to the Americans and the Chinese. This is very useful to help international marketers better understand the cultural differences among markets and thus adopt more appropriate marketing strategies.