Influence of Brand Personality on Brand Love: The Mediating Role of Brand Trust in Fast Food Franchisers in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Modern businesses are facing a huge rivalry in every aspect of their operations. In order to survive within this extremely competitive environment, every business organization is trying to be unique. One strategy the organizations can use is building strong long-term customer relationships. Literature suggests that the human related marketing concepts like brand personality, brand love and brand trust play a vital role in building long term relationships with customers. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the influence of brand personality on brand love while examining the mediating role of brand trust in fast food franchisers in Sri Lanka. For this purpose, a modified scale of brand personality was used. According to the previous literature Sri Lankan culture being feminine oriented and possessing soft attributes, the ruggedness trait is not significantly found or evident. Through that idea modified brand personality which consists of four dimensions except ruggedness has taken into the consideration. Further, brand trust scale defined by Yongium Sung (2010) and brand love scale defined by Yao Ching Wang (2019) were used as the mediator and the dependent variable respectively. A quantitative study was designed with a convenience sampling method where data was collected through online structured questionnaire from the western province. Four hypotheses were developed with the literature support and SPSS was used as the data analysis tool. Multiple regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses. All the hypotheses were supported by data including mediating hypothesis. This study showed that not all brand personality traits have the same influence and in order to manage a strong long-lasting relationship between the consumer and a brand, some traits are more efficient than others. This research thus offers them various relational paths. This study is limited to the franchised fast-food industry therefore further investigations can be done on telecommunication and FMCG industries to generalize the results. This study can be taken as a source of literature for the future researchers and contributes managerial aspects on building strong brand relationships.