The impact of emotional branding on brand loyalty in the skin care market

Master's Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 67, South Bank University London (Business), course: International Business, language: English, abstract: Satisfying customers is no longer sufficient for being successful in today's business environment. A number of studies suggest that more and more marketers aim to create emotional bonds between their brands and their consumers in order to enhance brand loyalty and the organisation's profitability. Emotional brand attachment plays an important role in marketing, particularly, in the cosmetics industry. Thus, the overall aim of this research is to investigate how emotional brand attachment affects brand loyalty in the skin care market in the UK and in Germany with a special focus on Nivea and Dove. Furthermore, the study focuses on a number of other research objectives, such as to find out what communications and branding strategies Dove and Nivea use and compare them in order to find out which brand is more successful in establishing brand loyalty and why. Other objectives are to evaluate whether addressing the consumer's actual or ideal self is more effective, to investigate what other factors impact brand loyalty and to what extent they moderate the effects of emotional brand attachment and to see if the impact of emotional brand attachment on brand loyalty differs in the German and the UK market. In order to examine these research questions a number of hypotheses have been stated. The study is based both on primary and secondary research using qualitative research methods. The secondary research involves the analysis of written documents, and other sources of secondary data with the purpose to get an overview on the research topic and to investigate those research objectives that cannot solely be covered by the primary research. For the primary research two focus groups were conducted, one in the UK and one in Germany. The results of the groups were used to test the hypotheses and to draw conclusions from these findings in order to answer the research questions and to give recommendations for further academic research in this area and to help marketing managers to develop communications and branding strategies that boost brand loyalty. The study has come to the result that both brands effectively use emotional branding strategies to create brand loyalty and that emotions such as happiness, security, safety, reassurance and trust are essential for creating brand loyalty in the skin care market. It was also found out that addressing the consumer's actual self rather than the ideal self is more important for building emotional bonds and loyalty.