BRAND LOYALTY FOR VEHICLES AMONG INDIAN MIDDLE CLASS FAMILIES

Because brand loyalty is so crucial to consumer behavior and a company's profitability, numerous studies have been conducted to identify the environmental (such as marketing) and individual factors that influence the degree or level of brand loyalty customers acquire towards businesses. As a result, “research has examined how several factors, such as socioeconomic class (Carman 1970), demography (Prasad 1975), personality (Carman 1970), prior experience (Tucker 1964) and perceived risk (Roselius 1971), affect brand loyalty”. Researchers have also looked into how environmental elements, such as perceived product quality, price activity levels, and the variety of brands available, affect consumer brand loyalty (McConnell 1968, Farley 1964). One factor in particular—perceived risk—appears to consistently effect brand loyalty among a variety of products and client populations, “according to multiple research (e.g., Derbaix 1983; Sheth and Venkatesan 1968). As a result, it has been found that risk perceptions affect brand loyalty or choice for a variety of goods and services, including drugs (Bearden and Mason 1978), retail stores that sell consumer goods (Prasad 1975), fabric softeners, laundry detergents, coffee, ice cream, and fabric softeners (Dunn, Murphy, and Skelly 1986), as well as automobiles (Peter and Ryan 1976). Even more interestingly, across a variety of client groups, brand loyalty has been discovered to be influenced by perceived risk. For instance, despite the general lack of cross-cultural research (Albaum and Peterson 1984), perceived risk has been found to influence brand loyalty in culturally and economically varied countries including Mexico (Hoover, Green, and Saegert 1978), India (Kanwar 1989), and the U.S”.