The Influence Of Symbolic Positioning Strategy On Brand Loyalty

With the advent of the information explosion, consumers are being exposed in massive products information in the 21 century, which dramatically changes consumers’ needs and consuming feature. As a result, it’s difficult for consumers to make a quick purchasing decision, so the companies have to adapt their marketing strategies to understand consumers’potential needs and attract them. At the same time, the brand loyalty has become a key attribute for the companies to survive the rivals. Thus, it’s very necessary to have a better understanding of the relationship between the positioning strategy and brand loyalty.The paper has adopted the prior studies about symbolical positioning, psychological contract and brand loyalty and provided a framework dealing with direct and indirect effects of symbolical positioning on brand loyalty. The model posits that the psychological contract mediates the effect of symbolic positioning on brand loyalty.The model was tested using laptop as product stimulus in a survey of 450 laptop student owners. We choose laptop because laptop are easily to be seen as a symbolic product and are used across a variety of situations both in the mainland and Taiwan in China. We use SPSS 17.0 and AMOS 4.0 to analyze the date we get. The model was mostly supported by the data. First the results showed the positive effect of symbolic positioning on brand loyalty. Second, our study explained the mechanism how the symbolic positioning works through psychological contract. However, as a result of different marketing environment between China context and abroad, the concept of "psychological contract" failed to be divided into two dimension as "transactional contract" and "relational contract".Additional managerial implications are discussed. However, as the key attributes to the brand loyalty are quite complicated, with some deficient of the survey, so there may be some shortcoming and further research is needed.