Diagnosis of Brand Studies in Iran with a Focus on Brand Loyalty: A Meta-Synthesis Approach

In the competitive world of today brand loyalty is one of the strategic requirements. Increasingly being noticed, the manifestation of brand strength in the market is one of the main components of the success of companies, Brand loyalty is a relatively biased behavioral response to a purchase or recommendation that a person makes toward a brand over time. Brand loyalty is a relatively biased behavioral response to a purchase or recommendation that occurs over time in a person towards a brand, and this causes the tendency to choose that brand in the decision-making and evaluation processes from among other brands that one has in mind. The present study seeks the diagnosis of brand studies in Iran with a focus on brand loyalty and aims to answer the following questions: What are the indicators of brand loyalty? How the components of brand loyalty can be measured? What are the antecedents of brand loyalty? What are the consequences of brand loyalty?

Applying qualitative meta-synthesis research method, all the scientific-research and scientific-extensional articles indexed in databases of the Scientific Information Database (SID), the Noormags, Humanities Portal, Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC), Magiran, and related journals published from 2009 to 2020 were investigated. Subsequently, 401 articles were selected and after being evaluated, regarding parameters such as their titles, abstracts, content, ease of access, and quality of the research method applied in them. The invalid articles were removed. Finally, 75 papers were recognized as suitable for being coded were and being analyzed.

The identified concepts and themes were classified into 10 main categories to designate the conceptual framework of the research. Antecedents of brand loyalty included marketing mix, integrated marketing communications, and customer relationship management. The consequences of brand loyalty included individual, organizational and national consequences, and the dimensions of brand loyalty included attitude, emotional, behavioral, and functional. The results showed that one of the most serious disadvantages is that research in the field of brand loyalty is not problem-oriented. Other disadvantages included the lack of a precise definition of brand loyalty, focusing too much on the quantitative research approaches, especially structural equation modeling (SEM), and inappropriate translation of some words.

In this study, the diagnosis of research related to brand loyalty was investigated using the meta-synthesis approach. The framework stated that brand loyalty can be defined in four categories of attitudinal, emotional, behavioral, and functional loyalty and its antecedents are fundamental-institutional, motivational, and communicative factors that result in individual, organizational and national consequences.