The effect of social media marketing activities on brand image and brand loyalty

The acceleration of global economic integration and fierce commercial competition are challenging the ways in which brand image and brand loyalty are built and maintained. This encourages management to pay increased attention to these aspects of their business. Today, businesses have had to develop brand loyalty and brand image in order to survive, develop and be successful in a competitive market. It is thought that the development of brand image and brand loyalty can provide long-term benefits for businesses to maintain their competitiveness. In this thesis, considering the increasing importance of brand image and brand loyalty, factors that will help to improve them have been determined. Social media marketing components (page quality and design, online interaction, social media activities and contents, service quality, activity, cooperation with other pages, usefulness), which are important tools of the marketing sector, will contribute to the quality and efficiency of marketing services by affecting brand image and brand loyalty. There are many factors that affect brand image and brand loyalty. Social media marketing components are also included in these factors. Social media marketing components influence the purchasing decision of consumers by being effective on brand image and brand loyalty. Based on these situations, the aim of the research is to reveal the effects of social media marketing components on brand image and brand loyalty. The research was carried out using quantitative research methods. Within the scope of the study, data were collected by applying an online questionnaire to the participants. This study was carried out on those who follow the LC Waikiki ready-to-wear brand on social media. The online questionnaire was applied to 451 participants who agreed to participate in the study. For the collected data, factor analysis, reliability test, correlation and multiple regression analyzes were performed by using SPSS package program, respectively. In the exploratory factor analysis, social media marketing consists of 7 factors, brand image consists of one factor and brand loyalty consists of two factors. Hypotheses were formed depending on the factors obtained, and multiple regression analyzes were performed in the SPSS package program to test these hypotheses. According to the findings obtained as a result of the research, it has been seen that social media marketing components have positive effects on brand image, attitudinal brand loyalty and behavioral brand loyalty. However, detailed results show that the most effective dimension of social media marketing components on brand image is page quality / design, followed by usefulness and collaboration with other pages, respectively. It is seen that the most effective dimension on attitudinal loyalty is social media activities and content, followed by online interaction, page quality / design, cooperation with other pages and activity dimensions, respectively. It was observed that the most effective dimension on behavioral loyalty was page quality / design, followed by cooperation with other pages, social media activities and contents, and online interaction dimensions, respectively.