Brand Trust and Attitudinal Loyalty as Mediators of Marketing Support and Behavioral Loyalty: A Comparison between Two Oil Companies

Abstract

The purposes of this research were: a) to compare means of brand trust, attitudinal and behavioral brand loyalty among customers having different backgrounds, and between the two oil companies having different marketing support; and b) to develop and validate the causal model of behavioral brand loyalty, and to study the effects of marketing support on behavioral brand loyalty via the two mediators of brand trust and attitudinal brand loyalty, using a comparison between two oil companies: PTT Public Company Limited and Chevron Corporation, Thailand. The survey research was employed and a questionnaire used to collect, collecting data from the consumers in Bangkok Metropolitan Area, the age of which were not less than 17 years. The researcher used two sets of questionnaire to collect data from the two samples of 400 and 40 respectively, and also used the structural interview to collect additional data from sample. Data analyses consisted of analysis of variance and the analysis of SEM with mediators. The research results were as follows: a) From sample 1 the analysis results indicated that the means of trust and attitudinal brand loyalty among customers having different background had no significant difference, but comparing between customers of the companies with different marketing support indicated significant difference with higher average of the PTT Public Company Limited than that of Chevron Corporation. On the contrary, sample 2 showed no significant difference in means between the two companies. And b) the model validation result indicated that the causal model of behavioral loyalty was valid with Chi-square = 6.985, df = 3, p = .072, GFI = .872, RMR = 0.108, RMSEA = 0.187. The study of the effects in the mediation models revealed that the attitude loyalty had practical and significant effect on behavioral loyalty, while direct and indirect effects of trust on behavioral loyalty via attitudinal loyalty would be significant only if the sample size was greater than 100.