The idea of brand loyalty is an issue that has worried researchers and marketing managers for decades, and the main reason is that it is associated with the benefits of the company. The brands are not related solely to the products; heavy investments by the distributors are made to enhance the image of the company or the brand and heritage, with the purpose of creating loyalty to the establishment. The definitive objective of a company is to generate value for the clients and develop relations on the basis of characteristics of the organization, in order to grant credibility to other brands of the company (Dick & Basu, 1994).
Consumers choose different places to do their shopping, guided by various reasons that influence their choice, until they show a certain preference for an establishment. This preference can be based only on convenience, such as low prices, ease of access, proximity to the home and promotions, among others, but also for emotional aspects, since when relating to a certain establishment, the consumer can acquire a feeling of great closeness and affection towards him and towards the products that he offers, which is originated by the satisfaction that the place offers him in terms of reliability, pleasant atmosphere and the attention of his staff. When this happens, the consumer begins to frequent a specific establishment and creates a familiar connection to it.
Brand name is a marketing strategy that often works as a heuristic, because people acquire preferences for their favorite brands and may not change their minds for the rest of their lives. Loyalty of clients and customer satisfaction are complementary constructs; it is assumed that customers satisfied with a certain brand, become loyal to that brand. (Cardozo, 1965) States that the first academic in the marketing area to investigate customer satisfaction, based on concepts of psychology, to understand future purchasing behavior. However, the interest in measuring customer satisfaction arises from the application of total quality approaches in the decade of the 1980s (Allen & Rao, 2000).
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The investigations focused on determining what are the factors or drivers of customer satisfaction. According to Allen & Rao (2000), there is no general consensus among researchers about how to operationalize the concept of loyalty; they argue that it can be considered as an attitudinal state or exclusively as a behavior. Assuming that customer loyalty is a combination of behaviors and attitudes, it can be said that loyal customers are those who have a favorable attitude and repeat purchases; they mention (Dick & Basu, 1994) as proponents of this definition.
However, Allen & Rao (2000) argue that this approach leads to ‘spurious loyalty’, which occurs when customers make repeated purchases without having a favorable attitude towards the brand. A resistance to change and high repurchase rates do not necessarily mean that a base of loyal customers has been captured, since there may be several causes of this desired behavior; therefore, according to these authors, the behavior is not loyalty, but the result of loyalty. Allen & Rao (2000), based on other authors, propose that customer loyalty has two main proportions: a sensible or a rational component and a sentimental or an affective one.
The rational component comprises of the assessment of the commercial interaction which includes proximity, time saving methods and the price factor amongst various others. Whereas the sentimental component is an expressive state that comprises of social communication. As mentioned above, the model proposed by these authors considers that satisfaction and loyalty are two different constructs: satisfaction has a straightforward association with the attributes and services of a service or a product or a distributor, and can be a comparatively further vibrant ration; On the contrary, devotion is a wider and an additional stationary behavior towards a brand. Similarly, (Flavian, Torres, & Guinaliu, 2004) state that the marketing literature on consumer loyalty distinguishes between loyalty based on satisfaction and loyalty based on inertia or spurious loyalty.
This means that there are loyal purchasers who have assumed a greater degree of pledge to the purchase and who are satisfied with their shopping experience, and there is another type of customer who does not acquire a commitment to the purchase, and who always chooses the same option for reasons other than satisfaction, such as, for example, the absence of other options or for perceiving higher costs in the change of establishment. Multiple loyalty conceptualization proposals have been elaborated, resulting in different forms of operationalization for the concept (Fornell, Johnson, & Anderson, 1996). For example, measure loyalty through repurchase and consumer tolerance of price changes (De Ruyter, Bloemer, & Peeters , 1997) operationalize loyalty based on the intention to repurchase the client and the commitment to the product / service or business.
On the other hand, (Oliver, 1999) proposes a conceptual model that presents loyalty as a process in several stages. It starts with a cognitive loyalty (positively evaluate the performance of the brand); continues with an affective loyalty (feeling good with the product) and a behavioral loyalty (pledge to re-buy from the brand) and culminates with an action loyalty (repurchase of the brand). (Sawmong & Omar, 2004) resume these stages to measure the extent of customers’ devotion in the supermarket sector, establishing that cognitive and affective loyalty are influenced by aspects already mentioned above such as the perception of competitive price, the quality of products, the comfort to buy with children and the accepted forms of payment.
Other studies confirm the incidence of the quality of the service and the merchandise in the loyalty of the consumer of this sector (Sirohi, et al. 1998). In particular, there is little literature that studies consumer behavior and loyalty to establishments; hence, it is important to develop more research regarding the behavior of these consumers, particularly if there are consumers or not loyal to establishments and brands of products purchased in the supermarket, purpose of this study.
The supermarket sector is an important link in the productive system because it is the distribution channel for a large number of goods. This industry shows an expansion in recent decades, mainly as a result of the growth of the national economy, which is reflected in the increase in consumer purchasing capacity, the development of different formats for different socioeconomic levels of the population and the incorporation of services that were not traditionally offered in these establishments, as is the case of a greater offer of credits by retailers, acceptance of new forms of payment, extension of schedules and delivery of products at home (Flavian, Torres, & Guinaliu, 2004).
Brand loyalty is a quality of brand value, which refers to those people who are seen buying from a same company or a brand every time they go shopping. This need arises to conduct a research that illustrates the main factors that intervene in the buyers to choose a certain supermarket and be loyal to that brand of the company; in which everyone can feel comfortable covering all their purchase expectations. When trying to explore the aspects that can determine the options of a specific shopping center (supermarket), we will be looking to clarify what are the main variables that a consumer seeks to find to be motivated to continue attending a certain supermarket.
