Antecedents of word-of-mouth as a component of brand loyalty towards luxury fashion brands and its moderating factors

Master's Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: A, King`s College London, course: International Marketing, language: English, abstract: In today's competitive marketplace, companies need to establish a loyal customer base in order to be successful. In particular, the fashion industry relies on a loyal customer base and a good reputation to achieve sustainable financial growth. To survive the current challenges of growing competition, marketers must ensure that customers do not only develop a personal relationship with brands but also speak favourably of them. Prior research has focused on word-of-mouth as a component of brand loyalty and its antecedents. However, this topic turned out to be inadequately investigated in the specific context of luxury fashion brands. Hence, the aim of this study is to examine how satisfaction, trust and commitment but also socio-psychological factors influence the consumer and thus have an impact on word-of-mouth. The nature of this study led to a quantitative methodological approach: an online survey investigating the sources of word-of-mouth. As a conclusion, this paper confirmed that trust and commitment were among the most important predictor variables of word-of-mouth. The main finding was, however, that socio-psychological factors such as materialism, social identity and possessiveness also increased positive word-of-mouth. However, since materialism and possessiveness are regarded as negative personality traits and cannot strengthen the effect of satisfaction, trust and commitment on word-of-mouth it is recommended that marketers concentrate on positive dimensions of word-of-mouth and brand loyalty (i.e., trust and commitment) in order to build a strong customer relationship.