The effect of after sale service on brand loyalty: A study on household appliances users and proposal of a structual brand loyalty model

Brand loyalty has become an important issue recently for both practitioners and academicians working in the marketing field as a result of the fierce competition in the market places. Also, this ongoing competition has turned the services bundled with the products and offered after sale into a vital tool for the rivals to keep up with the continuously upward change in the expectation levels of today?s conscious customers. Many researches were conducted to find out which factors influence the customer?s subsequent choices and purchases of the predetermined brand among a number of other alternatives. On the other hand, the studies about how customer services provided after sale affect the brand loyalty in the scope of the customer behavior shaped by the post-modern consumption motives are rarely come across. At this point, it appears that a research needs to be performed on how after sale services are perceived and examined in the loyalty process by a Turkish customer of durable house appliances who shows different characteristics from the customers of similar appliances in any other country. The main aim of this study is to construct a structural model explaining the relation between after sale services and brand loyalty and functionalize this model with a measurement tool. Thus, this study focuses on determining the intervening effects between the after sale services and the other factors influencing the brand loyalty and illuminating how this intervention affects the brand loyalty overall. In this framework, a theoretical research model was proposed. The sample size was determined as 103 individual users of the durable house appliances and the data were collected by utilizing a questionnaire adopted from the different prior studies. Structural equation modeling approach, confirmatory and expletory factor analyses were performed to investigate the casual relationship suggested with the theoretical research model. At the end of the data analysis, it was found that after sale services influence brand loyalty indirectly via perceived brand value, customer satisfaction, perceived brand trust and customer delight