The Impact of Brand Credibility on Customer's Loyalty from the Appliances Buyers Perspective

Due to the fact that acquiring new customers is much costly than establishing a broader and deeper relationship with existing customers، the concept of customers’ loyalty and brand recognition are important factors. One of the factors that create and increase customers’ loyalty commitment is brand credibility. Brand credibility is one of the most valuable assets of any company. Brands which bring additional credibility to customers can achive a special place in consumers'' minds. This is a descriptive – correlational with a casual approach and in terms of purpose it is an applied study. In this study، the relationship between brand credibility (that is defined as the trustworthiness and expertise) as the independent variable and satisfaction، commitment to loyalty and continuance commitment as dependent variables were investigated. The relationship between satisfaction، loyalty and commitment with willingness to change and oral recommendations to purchase as an independent variables and the relationship between commitment and willingness to change were tested. The population size in this study include all consumers of appliance products in Rasht. Stratified random sampling، a form of stratified sampling and proportional to size، is used. Data were collected from 412 completed questionnaires filled by household consumers. Hypotheses were tested by structural equation modeling methods and the results are as follow: Brand credibility has a direct impact on satisfaction، commitment، commitment to loyalty and continuous commitment. Satisfaction has a direct impact on commitment and oral recommendations to purchase. Satisfaction will reduce consumers willingness to brand change. Commitment to loyalty has no impact on the two dependent variables namely willingness to brand change and oral recommendations to purchase. Continuous commitment has no impact on willingness to brand change.