THE EFFECT OF CONSUMER INVOLVEMENT ON BRAND LOYALTY: A STUDY ON SMART PHONE PRODUCTS
The main aim of this study is to reveal the effect of consumers' product involvement levels on their brand loyalty in terms of smart phones. Another purpose of this study is to detect whether this predicted effect differ based on gender. In order to achieve this goal, a research was implemented by using face to face survey method on 665 Balikesir University Burhaniye School of Applied Science students who are determined with convenience sampling method. The reason of using this sample is the anticipation of that university students' consciousness and involvement levels about smart phones might be higher than other populations. In order to determine consumer involvement level, Consumer Involvement Profiles (CIP) which is developed by Kapferer and Laurent (1985) and one of commonly used scales in consumer involvement researches, was used. As for brand loyalty, a 6 item scale that developed by Zeithaml, Berry, and Parasuraman (1996) as five items and one dimension, and then, adapted by Lam, Shankar, Erramilli, and Murthy (2004) as two dimensions (repurchase/ patronage and recommendation) by adding one item to repurchase/ patronage dimension, was used. The research results demonstrate that symbolic value, risk probability, and hedonic value dimensions of consumer involvement have effects on repurchase/ patronage dimension of brand loyalty. In addition, the results support that interest, symbolic value, risk probability, and hedonic value dimensions of consumer involvement have effects on recommendation dimension of brand loyalty. When these results evaluated from the point of gender, some different findings were obtained. With reference to these results, the findings were interpreted and the study was concluded with suggestions to researchers and managers.