Brand management through building a loyalty chain of the target audience

Abstract

The paper examines theoretical approaches to brand management and loyalty management. The method used is the analyses of academic publications, scientific articles on brand management and loyalty management. The author argues that brand management aims at a customer’s loyalty to a brand, whereas loyalty management considers branding as one of the techniques to obtain customer loyalty towards a company. However, none of these two subject matters fully defines the mechanics of how brand loyalty is formed and how a brand can manage that. The author introduces the notion of customer loyalty chain which consists of positive brand attitude formation, trust, forming satisfaction from brand interacting, and as a consequence, creation of loyalty. Understanding of customer’s cognitive and affective processes including customer’s reasons, drivers and barriers at every stage of brand loyalty formation helps a company manage more precisely the process of brand loyalty formation, integrate these data into a new brand creation making the brand native for the customer. The paper provides mechanisms of customer loyalty chain integration into brand management and evaluation metrics system of such integration.