Impact of corporate brand on repurchase intention, the mediating role of relationship quality

Abstract

With the changing of the competition rules, increase in global business, merging of new players in the automotive market, homogenization of vehicles, applying of new concepts of marketing and shifting from product brand to the corporate brand, all these factors create some challenges for companies such as keeping their ranking in the market share quota and retaining their customers. Beside that the complex names of the companies makes problems for consumers in remembering the companies’ names. Therefore the automotive companies will face a fierce competition in automotive market and force them to follow new marketing concept such as corporate brand to differentiate them self than other competitors, keep their names in consumers mind and retaining customers.

Many studies indicate that an improvement of 5 percent in customer retention leads to an increase of 25 percent to 75 percent in profit. And to cost more than five times as much to obtain a new customer, thus it is better for companies to pay effort for retaining customer rather than getting new one, and give more attention to such factors that effecting repurchase intention. There for this study will aim to find out to what extent the corporate brand dimensions affects on repurchase intention ,the mediating role of relationship quality between corporate brand and repurchase intention, the moderating effect of word of mouth between relationship quality and repurchase intention depending on the theory of planned behavior intention approach.

To test the hypotheses, the study used a purposive sampling technique and gathered data from 322 useable responses out of the 500 questionnaires distributed to the automotive customers in Sudan. Findings revealed that there are three components of corporate reputation, corporate image and corporate familiarity.

The results provided evidence that components of corporate brand played an important role in influencing repurchase intention and relationship quality.The results of the study demonstrate the corporate satisfaction has full mediating effect on the relationship between corporate familiarity and repurchase intention while the customer trust and customer commitment have partial mediating effect. This study also provided evidence to eliminate the moderating effect of the word of mouth on the relationship between relationship quality and repurchase intention. Based on the study’s findings, discussions of the existing findings as well as the theoretical, practical implications and limitations, of the study were provided.

BADR ELGASIM BALLA MOHAMED SUST, JUNE, 2015