Investigation of generation Y customer value dimensions' effects to their loyalty behaviours while choosing their smartphone brands

Competition between brands has increased considerably as globalization has enabled consumers to reach many brands. Because of this competition, companies try to make new marketing efforts in order to differentiate their products/or services and aiming to gain loyal customers. The need of this differentiation in this high competitive environment has led to the emergence of the concept of consumer values. There are many conceptual frameworks and researches about the consumer value. Some researchers developed "get versus give" perspectives for the consumer value. Quality vs price or sacrifices vs. price models, among others. Since these perspectives are extremely narrow, some multidimensional models are developed. In this study, consumer value has taken into consideration as four multidimensional model that has functional value-price, functional value-quality, emotional values and social values. In many researches, it is found that consumer value has a positive effect on brand loyalty. Brand loyalty is a very important factor of the sales of a company. Loyal customers are more profitable than the other ones because they repurchase the products/services so companies do not need to make an additional marketing effort selling their products/services. However, creating the loyal customers is not an easy task in the present time. Customers who are namely consumers have many alternative brands, therefore, their decision can easily change as well as they are more open to make criticism about a product/service. Especially last ten years, internet sales are very high and there are many online sales websites on the internet. Even there is a marketing type has to be created because of this high usage rate of internet which is called online marketing. Consumers can read the other users comments and see all the features, as prices and other attributes of their requested products/service from the internet. Internet is also a function of the cell phones, therefore, it is named as smartphone. Consumers can easily reach information via their smartphones and their usage rate is increasing day by day both in Turkey and in the world. For this reason, the smartphone industry is growing quickly. First smartphones' market-entry date was 1990s and today they have become an important part of the lives of many people in the world, especially for the tech-savvy Generation-Y. In order to compete with other brands, smartphone producers launch more models or series in a year. Therefore, consumers have many options while buying the smartphones. Thanks to the technology that has developed along with globalization, sales have begun on the internet, consumers have been comparing brands and they have reached to all the information through the internet. This makes it difficult for companies to have loyal customers. Generation Y, also known as Millennials who was born between 1980 and 2000 is the main target consumer group for this study because they were witness to the globalization of the world and technological developments. Millennials are one of the largest generations in history. In Turkey, their population is about 30 million and in the world they are almost $ 2 billion. This high population brings the high-spending potential and this makes the Millenials an important target audience for companies and also marketers. They are considered the most tech-savvy generation between the current generations. They are almost addicted to their smartphones. In contrast to this addiction to the technology, they considered less brand loyal generation. In this study, effect of consumer values on the brand loyalty is examined with using the Generation Y smartphone users as target audience. On the thesis model, dependent variable is defined as brand loyalty and independent variables are defined as the dimensions of the consumer value which are functional value-price, functional value-quality, emotional value and social value. Additonal to this, demographical differences are examined on the basis of the attitude towards the each customer value and brand loyalty of the generation Y. In the first section, it has been mentioned that how generation theory is evolved and what is the general features of the generations that are living as of today. There are five living generations: The Silent Generation (1925-1945), Baby Boomers (1946-1964), Generation X (1965-1979), Generation Y (1980-2000) and Generation Z (2000 to today). There are many ideas regarding the start and end of the birth dates for Generation Y. For this research, with detailed literature review and considering the important historical events in Turkey and in the world, Generation Y's start and birth dates are considered as 1980-2000. In the second section, consumer value, brand loyalty and Generation Y's brand loyalty has been examined with the detailed literature review. Brand value taken as a multidimensional subject which is related not only the functional features as quality and price but also related with the physiological perspective of the consumer's value as emotional and social values. It gives broader perspective and more clear understanding about the Generation Y's brand loyalty drivers. Many researches have many explanation about what brandy loyalty is. In this study, it is mentioned that how brand loyalty has been evolved from the 1920s until today and all generally accepted brand loyalty models has been examined. There are four types of brand loyalty. (1) Cognitive loyalty which is the result of first interaction between consumer and brand. Consumer begins to know that brand name and its features. (2) Affective loyalty is the emotional stage of the loyalty. Consumer begins to like the brand and he/she becomes to see the positive sides of that brand. (3) Conative loyalty is the pre-loyalty stage. Consumer would like to buy that brand and he/she begin to attach to that brand but still not a completely loyal. (4) Action loyalty is the stage of the complete loyalty to a brand. In this stage, consumer do not interested with the other brands or their features and he/she keeps buying his/her brand despite the other brands have more advantegous than she/he uses. Generation Y brand loyalty perspective is different from the previous generations because they are exposed to many advertisements of many brands. They can also easily reach their requested brand. So they are considered as less brand loyal generation. They mostly prefer the products/services which are compatible with their personalities and their lifestyles. Purpose of this research is to examine the effect of the consumer value dimensions to Generation Y's brand loyalty. So consumer values which are functional value-price, functional value-quality, emotional value ad social value are taken as independent variables. Brand loyalty is taken as dependent variable. For to examine the relation between these variable hypothesis are created. As an additional research was made to be able to examine if customer value attitudes and brand loyalty behaviours can change according to the Generation Y's demographic structure. To collect the data for testing the hypotheses, a questionnaire was prepared and distributed on the internet between the dates of 12.02.2018 and01.03.2018. As a result, 406 valid questionnaires are implicated in the research and analysed with SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) 20.0 for windows. For the analysis of the collected data independent variables together and dependent variable seperately were inserted into factor analysis in order to have definable variables from the obtained data. Hypotheses were tested by performing Simple Regression, t-tests and ANOVA analyzes. As a result of the hypotheses' analyses, on the contrary of some researchers findings, price which is a functional value doest not effect the Generation Y brand loyalty. Another variable of the functional value which is quality effects the Generation Y brand loyalty positively. It means that, functional value should not taken as one complete dimension because there is a significance difference between price's and quality's effect on the brand loyalty. Other consumer value dimensions, which are emotional and social values effects Generation Y brand loyalty positively. As a result of the demographic difference hypotheses' analyse results, there is a difference beetween gender, age, profession and total household income levels when examined the attitudes of generation Y to the functional-price customer value. For the generation Y's attitudes to functional-quality value, the difference is occured by marital status. For the attitude to both emotional social customer values, the only difference is occured by gender. On the basis of brand loyalty for generation Y, difference is occured by total household income levels. The results of these findings can be utilized by smartphone producer companies to develop their marketing strategies to the Generation Y consumers. For future research, it is suggested to examine effect of the consumer value on the brand loyalty in more detailed way, including other customer value theory models.