پیش بینی وفاداری برند تلفن هوشمند: دیدگاه مصرف کنندگان و ارزش شناسایی نام تجاری مصرف کننده Predicting smartphone brand loyalty: Consumer value and consumer-brand identification perspectives

1. Introduction With the proliferation of the competing brands in the marketplace, keeping consumers loyal is an imperative for marketing managers (Jones & Sasser, 1995). Researchers have devoted a considerable amount of effort investigating this issue. They have advocated thatthe notion of brand loyalty should be extended from patronage behavior to psychological commitment (Oliver, 1999), and both attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty contribute to pro-brand consequences. Attitudinal loyalty may be positively associated with patronage intention, word-of-mouth, acceptance of premium price, and resistance to counter-persuasion, while behavioral loyalty may lead to greater market share and increased profitability (Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2001; Shankar, Smith, & Rangaswamy, 2003). Standing on various theoretical grounds, researchers have investigated the reasons for brand loyalty, but two viewpoints have received greater amount of attention. The first is consumer value theory, which claims that value perception is the pivotal predictor of brand loyalty (Kim, Gupta, & Koh, 2011; Sweeney & Soutar, 2001). Consumers remain loyal if they perceive superior value from a given brand (Hansen, Beitelspacher, & Deitz, 2013). The second viewpoint is the identification approach, which puts consumer-brand identification (hereafter referred to as brand identification) as the antecedent of brand loyalty (Bhattacharya & Sen, 2003; Tuskej, ˇ Golob, & Podnar, 2013). Consumers stick with a given brand once they identify themselves with the attributes of the brand (Stokburger-Sauer, Ratneshwar, & Sen, 2012). Some studies have further contended that both viewpoints may positively result in brand trust and then brand loyalty (He, Li, & Harris, 2012), supporting claims that these are the foundations of brand loyalty.