| Abstract [eng] |
The Master's thesis analyses the country of origin aspect in the context of consumers' brand loyalty: how consumers' attitudes towards brands from specific countries and relationships with it can interact with consumers' emotional attachment and purchasing behaviour, and their evaluation of brand attributes. The first part analyses the content of the scientific literature in the context of consumer brand loyalty, presents the concept of this phenomenon, the factors shaping it, the segmentation of loyalty and its benefits for the organisation, and the links between loyalty and the country of origin of the brand that have been found so far. The second part discusses the methodology of the study: the reasons for the choice of the quantitative research method and the questionnaire survey, the research instrument and its themes and the theoretical rationale, the sampling and ethical considerations, and the other relevant details of the study. The third part of the paper provides a statistical analysis of the results, discusses the results, and compares them with the results obtained by other authors. The main question addressed in this paper is what is the relationship between a brand's country of origin and consumer loyalty? In order to answer this question, consumers' attitudes towards the characteristics of furniture with a Scandinavian origin and history were analysed and related to consumer loyalty towards a Scandinavian furniture brand. It also analysed consumers' purchasing behaviour, frequency of visits to the brand's stores and their intentions to visit in the future. The results showed that consumers' country-of-origin-based attitudes towards products and their attributes are statistically significantly positively related to the level and components of brand loyalty, and statistically significant positive correlations were found between this phenomenon and the evaluation of brand attributes and repeat purchases and the intention to revisit the brand's stores in the next six months. The strongest correlations were found between country-of-origin-based consumer attitudes towards durability, comfort and brand loyalty, while the weakest correlations were found between country-of-origin-based consumer attitudes towards sustainability aspects and brand loyalty. Additional findings revealed a correlation between consumers' brand loyalty and their purchasing behaviour: there was a statistically significant positive correlation between consumers' brand loyalty, the salience of its components and the frequency of purchases from the brand's stores, and consumers with higher brand loyalty were more likely to make future visits to the brand's stores and to choose medium or large purchases than consumers with lower brand loyalty. The results also showed a positive relationship between the evaluation of brand attributes and the level of brand loyalty. |
