Abstract:

The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between brand personality and customer loyalty in the five-star business hotel and propose an effective way for developing a remarkable hotel brand and improving its customer loyalty. The reason for choosing a particular hotel is that it is a member of a famous international hotel chain with a well-known brand name. According to the literature, business hotels usually have stronger brand names comparing to leisure hotels. Literature review of the problem is presented along with a conceptual framework of brand personality and customer loyalty adopted for hotel industry. Using the data collected from a 5-star business hotel guests, factor analysis and multiple regression analysis were conducted in order to measure the impact of brand personality on customer loyalty. Although brand personality dimensions were similar with Aaker’s (1997) dimensions, “competence” dimension was switched with an “up-to-date” dimension in this new scale. As a result, brand personality has a positive effect on customer loyalty in this study. However, brand personality dimensions cannot be fully implemented and some dimensions are not appropriate for tourism industry. It is suggested that tourism marketing managers should be more focused on features of tourism while creating touristic brand personality.

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