Does Brand Love Precede Brand Loyalty? Empirical Evidence from Saudi Airline Customers in Strategic Alliance Setting

This research aims to construct a model that combines brand love, brand loyalty, brand image, customer satisfaction, and service quality into a single model, with brand loyalty coming foremost, and test its predictive power in building brand love. Moreover, mediating effect of customer satisfaction and brand image on service quality and brand loyalty affecting brand love was checked. The study adopted an alliance context using an existing SERVQUAL model, a bi-dimensional aspect of brand loyalty and parasocial love relationship theory, to identify brand love as a construct or outcome in the consumer-brand relationship. Using a quantitative approach, survey questionnaires were distributed by unrestricted random sampling among 507 Saudia Airlines customers. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling with SmartPLS 3.0. The results revealed significant relationships between four variables except for the brand image. It was found that brand image had no mediating effect on the relationship between service quality and customer loyalty. The outcome of this study highlights the importance of airline alliances for service quality, which leads to positive customer satisfaction, brand image, and customer loyalty. A unique contribution of the study is that it revealed that brand loyalty is also an antecedent of brand love.