Journal of Market Focused Management, 4, 341–370 (1999)
°
c 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston. Manufactured in The Netherlands.
Consumers’ Trust in a Brand and the Link to Brand
Loyalty
GEOK THENG LAU fbalaugt@[Link]
Assistant Professor, Department of Marketing, National University of Singapore, FBA1, 15 Law Link, Republic
of Singapore 117591
SOOK HAN LEE
Marketing Manager, Singapore Telecommunications Private Limited
Received June 17, 1999; Revised October 7, 1999
Abstract
Brands are important in the consumer market. They are the interface between consumers
and the company, and consumers may develop loyalty to brands. This study proposes
that trust in a brand is important and is a key factor in the development of brand loyalty.
Factors hypothesized to influence trust in a brand include a number of brand characteristics,
company characteristics and consumer-brand characteristics. Respondents representing a
broad spectrum of Singapore consumers were surveyed.
The findings reveal that brand characteristics are relatively more important in their effects
on a consumer’s trust in a brand. The results also show that trust in a brand is positively
related to brand loyalty. Marketers should, therefore, take careful consideration of brand
factors in the development of trust in a brand.
Keywords: trust, loyalty, branding
Introduction
Marketers have long been interested in the concept of brand loyalty because brand loyalty
is a measure of the attachment that a customer has to a brand (Aaker, 1991). Brand loyalty
brings the firm many benefits, including repeat purchases and recommendations of the
brand to friends and relatives. Brand management consultants espouse the importance of
brand loyalty, but despite a history of research conducted, the concept is not clearly defined.
Early research on brand loyalty focused on behavior. Brand loyalty was construed to be
a subset of repeat purchase behavior (Brown, 1952; Cunningham, 1956a) and intention
to repurchase. Later, researchers like Guest (1955) and Jacoby (1971) argued that brand
loyalty has two components: brand loyal behavior and brand loyal attitudes.
The attitude behind the purchase is important because it drives behavior. While brand
loyal behavior is partly determined by situational factors such as availability (Jacoby, 1971),
attitudes are more enduring. Unfortunately, despite its importance, brand attitudes have not
attracted a corresponding degree of research interest. A compilation of definitions and
342 LAU AND LEE
studies on brand loyalty by Jacoby and Chestnut (1978) revealed that research on brand
loyal behavior outnumbered studies on brand attitudes three to one.
O’Shaughnessy (1992) suggested that underlying loyalty is always trust, a willingness to
act without calculating immediate costs and benefits. Hence, loyalty to a brand involves
trusting it. In industrial marketing, the concept of trust is well developed (e.g. Ganesan,
1994; Doney and Cannon, 1997) and much effort has been spent in finding ways to build
and maintain it. In that context, trust is built on person-to-person relationships. Trust in a
brand differs from interpersonal trust because a brand is a symbol. Unlike a salesperson,
this symbol is unable to respond to the consumer.
To win loyalty in today’s markets, consumer marketers have to embrace what is becoming
second nature to business marketers (Donath, 1994) and focus on building and maintaining
trust in the consumer-brand relationship. Unfortunately, the concept of trust in consumer
marketing is largely unexplored. The focus of this study is to examine some factors affecting
the development of trust in brands of consumer good, and to explore how that trust relates to
brand loyalty. By applying current interpretations of trust to brand loyalty, this study seeks
to approach brand loyalty differently and to provide insights into consumers’ motivation
for loyalty to brands.
Brand Loyalty: Past Research
Copeland (1923) appears to be the first to suggest a phenomenon related to brand loyalty,
which he labeled ‘brand insistence’. Brown (1952) and Cunningham (1956b) analyzed
summary measures of brand purchase patterns and found marked consistencies in con-
sumers’ purchase patterns of brands of various products. They concluded that individuals
exhibit strong and operative brand loyalty. Others (Lipstein, 1959; Frank, 1962; Farley,
1963) also verified the phenomenon. These spurred continuous inquiry into brand loyal
behavior. Subsequent research explored how brand loyalty is related to the following
variables: loyalty-proneness (Cunningham, 1956a; Frank et al., 1969; Wind and Frank,
1969), store loyalty (Cunningham, 1961; Carman, 1969; Rao, 1969), consumer knowl-
edge about available brands (Tucker, 1964), product categories (Farley, 1964), perceived
quality (McConnell, 1968; Shapiro, 1970; Szybillo and Jacoby, 1974), consumers’ risk-
reduction behavior (Sheth and Venkatesan, 1968), consumer characteristics (Cunningham,
1956; Guest, 1964; Coulson, 1966; Frank, 1967; Carman, 1969; Newman and Werbel,
1973), and shopping pattern characteristics (Carman, 1969; Kuehn, 1962). The possibility
of multi-brand loyalty was also explored (Ehrenberg and Goodhardt, 1970; Jacoby, 1971)
and a variety of mathematical (mostly stochastic) models were designed to analyze brand
loyal behavior (Lipstein, 1959).
Engel et al. (1968), in their comprehensive review of brand loyalty literature up to 1967,
noted several significant problems. These include an absence of a conceptual framework
for viewing brand loyalty, an almost exclusive focus on the outcome of behavior, and
overly simple definitions of brand loyalty. Day (1969), Segger (1970) and Jacoby and
Kyner (1973) made similar criticisms. Day (1969) proposed viewing brand loyalty as
repeated purchases prompted by strong internal dispositions. He distinguished between true
and “spurious” loyalty, which is associated with purchases not guided by strong internal
