"Understanding Brand loyalty from the Consumer perspective: An exploratory study targeting Social networking services in Egypt"

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to discuss brand loyalty from a consumer perspective, its implication of the key components are; Uniqueness, Usability, and Integration In addition to the main factors according to the literature; Brand trust, perceived quality and shared values. The research also discusses Consumer satisfaction as a basic level of brand loyalty. It also aims to highlight the Integrative thinking as an approach to build and maintain brand loyalty for social networking services in Egypt. Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram need to do more effort to express their shared values if they want to rely on them to maintain brand loyalty in Egypt. Moreover, they need to focus on consumer's needs to build positive consumer experience and satisfaction, rather than societal and global issues. As People in Egypt and maybe in the developing countries, in general, are not interested in climate changes and the environmental problems, considering them a kind of luxury, they concentrated on their daily routine and personal needs rather than public and global issues. Some people don't trust the brand's intentions and they believe that the main concern and sometimes the only one for the brand is to build its own image and achieve its marketing objectives, which considers a serious obstacle if the brand decides to rely on societal shared values.Privacy used to be an important issue people concerned about since the using expansion of the internet, especially social media networking. With time people surrendered to the fact that they were unable to protect their own personal data and information and accustomed to dealing with it and they no longer pay the same attention as before. This explains why (Privacy) is not recently one of the key factors affecting purchase behavior or brand trust.Integrative thinking is the most effective factor in building and maintaining Google loyalty in Egypt. People prefer using a brand that enables him to fulfill a number of needs rather than using one brand for each. Further research should be done to confirm the results of this paper by applying to different brands and different countries.

Keywords

• brand loyalty; consumer perspective; social networking services; egypt