Brand and brand loyalty: An investigation about university students'jean choices and brand loyalty

In this master?s thesis study, theoretical explanations about brand and brandloyalty, which became pretty important topic in today?s world, are made, and studiesin the related literature about brand and brand loyalty are discussed.The purpose of the research study was to determine university students? jeanbrand choices and brand loyalties. Specifically, this study investigated whetheruniversity students? jean brand choices and loyalties differ or not depending on thestudents? demographical characteristics such as gender, age, faculty/college whichthey study in, their families? income situations, allocation units of their families,geographical region which their families live in, and occupational characteristics oftheir family heads.This research study was conducted on 500 university students who wererandomly selected among the students of Abant Izzet Baysal University, located inGölköy and city campuses in Bolu, in 2005-2006 Spring semester.In order to collect data, ?Brand Choices Scale? and ?Brand Loyalty Scale?,both developed by the researcher, were used to collect data. Also, in order to learnabout demographical characteristics and jean preferences of the participant students?a ?Personal Information Form? was applied in this study. Factor analysis was used toanalyze the data collected by ?Brand Choices Scale?, and cluster analysis was usedto analyze the data collected by ?Brand Loyalty Scale?. Varyans analysis wereapplied in order to test whether the factors and clusters differ depending on thestudents demographical characteristics. When the differences were found, Tukeytests were used to specifically determine difference between two variables. Then,discussions, results and suggestions were provided according to the findings aboutboth the participants? jean brand choices, brand loyalties.Key Words: Brand, Brand Choice, Brand Loyalty, Factor Analysis, ClusterAnalysis.