An Study On The Influence Of Consumer Self-concept Congruity On Brand Loyalty

How to improve the target customers’ loyalty has been always the focus of attention inboth the marketing research and business administration. Along with the deepening degree ofproduct homogeneity, both consumers’ brand attitudes and purchase behavior are not onlydetermined by the functional values that the brand can provide, but also more affected bythose symbolic attributes with the brand. Consumers are willing to choose products bycomparing their self-concept with the brand personality. The highly match between the brandpersonality and consumers’ self-concept enables those consumers to revealand maintain theirown self by buying and using the relevant product. And this kind of psychological comfortprompts consumers to have a positive attitude to the brand, be eager to maintain this state ofsatisfaction through continued buying, which eventually leads to brand loyalty. However, atpresent, the research about the influence of the congruity of consumers’ self-concept andbrand personality (simply named "self-concept congruity") on brand loyalty are very limited,and the domestic research on the mechanism between these two are even less.Therefore, based on the absorption of the results of previous research, this studysystematically reviewed the self-concept congruity literature and the brand loyalty literature,figuring out the relationships among consumer self-concept congruity, brand relationshipquality and brand loyalty, and constructed an conceptual model about the formation path ofbrand loyalty at the perspective of self-concept, in which self-concept congruity asindependent variables, brand relationship quality as the mediating variable and the brandloyalty as the dependent variable. The model was tested and analyzed using clothing as theproduct stimulus because of its outstanding explicit consumption characteristics in acollection of312domestic sample data. It led to these following conclusions:1. Four dimensions of the consumer self-concept congruity--ideal self-conceptcongruity, social self-concept congruity, ideal social self-concept congruity and actualself-concept congruity positively impact on brand relationship quality. And these influenceson brand relationship quality are less in turn.2. Brand relationship quality positively impact on brand loyalty. The greater the qualityof the relationship between consumers and the brand, the higher the brand loyalty will be. And based on the intense brand trust, brand satisfaction and affective commitment, this kindof loyalty has highlighted attitude orientation, therefore, is true and continued loyalty.This study has broadened the research scope of the domestic self-concept congruitytheory, enriching and developing the previous self-concept congruity literature. Meanwhile, italso developed the thoughts of cultivating customer loyalty for enterprises, having somecertain guiding significance for enterprises to segment the market based on consumers’self-concept and implement effective brand marketing activities.