Creating and maintaining strong brands and loyal customers have become increasingly difficult in today's competitive environment. Brand loyalty has been shown to be associated with higher rates of return on investment through increases in market share. Though several factors (e.g., trust, satisfaction, commitment, familiarity etc.) are found to influence brand loyalty, involvement plays a predominant role. This research has made an attempt to examine the relationship between involvement and brand loyalty. Involvement has been measured with the help of Consumer Involvement Profile (CIP) (Kapferer and Laurent, 1985) and the factor analysis revealed that 4 antecedents of involvement are highly significant. With the help of multiple regression the influence of these 4 antecedents on brand loyalty has been examined, the outcome confirms that involvement is one of the important Full color printing factor in predicting brand loyalty.
Introduction
After opening economy to global companies, India experiences mind-boggling whirr of changes in marketing. The Indian consumer is flooded with a plenty of brands, both Indian and international. The new brands offer innovative features with better quality, but from the perspective of Indian manufactures, these new entrants are major threats (Samudhra Rajakumar and Sritharan, 2004). In this context redefining of the role of marketing as creating, communicating and delivering value to customers (Kotler, 2006), and constant tracking of consumer preferences are a must to evolve some strategies to maintain their existence in the market; and one of them is creating brand loyalty.
Branding is the process by which companies distinguish their product offerings from those of their competitors (Aaker, 1991). Marketers develop these products into brands which attain a unique identity. By developing a unique identity, branding permits customers to develop an association with it and trust it. Once this trust is developed, branding will lead to high sales, ability to charge price premiums and the power to resist distribution of power (Ehrenberg et al., 1990). For example, Coke or Pepsi comes to mind when one refers to soft drink; Vicks Vaporub comes to mind as a solution for cold; and Dettol as an antiseptic for everyday nicks and cuts. These examples highlight the role of brands in consumers' buying behavior. Some brand images remain in the consumers' mind forever (eg., Cadbury's, Pears, Ponds, etc.) and they come to stand for an entire range of ideas, ralph lauren polos sentiments, etc. Thus a brand is created by augmenting a core product with distinctive values that distinguishes it from its competitors.
Brand loyalty
The issue of brand loyalty has generated considerable interest in recent years both in academic and managerial circles, since companies spend millions of rupees each year in establishing and tracking brand loyalty levels. Further, the cost of building powerful brands have sky-rocketed and the failure rate of new brands is high. Therefore, brand managers have started refocussing their attention on retaining their existing customers for long term benefits (Keller, 2005).
Brand loyalty is said to occur when a customer makes the choice of purchasing one brand from a set of alternatives, consistently over a period of time (Arunkumar and Meenakshi, 2006). Brands can signal a certain level of quality so that satisfied buyers can easily choose the product again. Sheth (1968) provided an conceptual definition of brand loyalty: "Brand loyalty is the function of a brand's relative frequency of purchase in both time--independent and time-dependent situations".
Jacoby replica soccer jersey and Chestnut (1978) provide the operational definition of brand loyalty as "Biased (i.e., nonrandom) behavioral response (i.e. purchase) expressed over a period of time by some decision-making unit with respect to one or more brands out of a set of such brands and is a function of psychological (decision--making evaluative) process". In their operational definition of brand loyalty, they have identified three kinds of categories which the various operational measures have placed as behavioral, attitudinal and composite.
In the traditional sense, brand loyalty refers to repetitive purchase behaviour or to the propensity to purchase a brand again (Baldinger, 1992) Pearl Jewelry or to the result of cognitive activity and decision making (Avinandan and Ghosh, 1996).
Literature Review
Various perspectives of brand loyalty have been studied by many marketers and researchers. Contributions of academicians towards brand loyalty are discussed below: Tucker (1964) reported that there was growth of brand loyalty even in a setting where there was no prior consumer's knowledge about any of the available brands. Frank (1967) reviewed brand loyalty and concluded that the results of brand loyalty is not encouraging and the responses of loyal buyers were found to be significantly different from those of non-loyal buyers to new brands being tried.
Livesey (1973) examined the concept of brand loyalty with regard to the television rental market. He investigated the underlying determinants of consumer behaviour in order to ascertain the market better. Finally, he concluded that the determinants of brand loyalty could be an important factor in relation to facing competition for marketers in service industry.
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