The Impact of Brand Personality on Customer Patronizing Behavior: with special reference to the supermarket industry in Sri Lanka

Abstract

In the field of service marketing, satisfying customer is relatively difficult than marketing practices of physical products. There are many factors considered by the service marketers in order to make the customer satisfaction and loyalty. Brand personality of the service companies are recognized as a key platform for development of loyal customer base for their organizations. When it comes to the modern retailing, self service supermarkets highly concern about branding strategies for attracting their customers towards their outlets. Hence, in this study, researchers attempted to investigate on "The impact of brand personality on customer patronizing decisions in Sri Lankan supermarkets." Further, literature provides sufficient evidence to support the empirical gap existing in Sri Lankan context. The main objective of the study is to identify the influenced made by brand personality on customer patronizing decisions and recommending strategies of the local supermarkets chains to create and maintain customer loyalty. Further specific objectives were developed to examine individual impact of brand personality dimensions and five hypotheses were formulated to determine the relationship among key constructs. Survey method was used to gather primary data from 240 randomly selected customers of three main supermarket chains located in Colombo city limits. Reliability test was carried out and Cronbach's Alpha values of each construct was found that a good interring reliability exist with the data. The results indicated that there are positive relationship between brand personality and customer patronizing decisions in Sri Lankan supermarkets. The results provide evidence to accept four hypotheses and reject one hypothesis. Finally researchers have emphasized some implications to retail marketers to develop their branding strategies in competitive markets.