Award-Winning Professor Explains Brand Loyalty

Jooyoung Kim, assistant professor of advertising at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, Athens, Ga., is the lead author of “The Six-Construct Model of True Brand Loyalty,” a research paper examining why consumers favor and consistently buy specific brands over time and motives for their behavior.

The paper’s co-authors are Jon Morris, professor of advertising at the University of Florida and Joffre Swait, adjunct marketing faculty at the University of Alberta and a partner in a research-based consulting company in Canada.

“Our work suggests that consumers’ attitudinal stability, which is based on emotional and cognitive conviction, plays a very important role in forming brand loyalty behaviors,” Kim explained. “Without this stability of attitude, consumers would easily switch to other brands for some unexpected situational reasons, such as price and availability. On the other hand, consumers with conviction-based attitudinal stability will not easily switch to other brands.”

The researchers theorized that true brand loyalty can be explained as a product of five distinct qualifications: brand credibility, affective brand conviction, cognitive brand conviction, attitude strength and brand commitment. Data from experimental conditions with manipulations lent support for the proposed model.

The American Academy of Advertising recently named theh paper the 2006 Best Conference Paper.

The American Academy of Advertising annual conference is the premiere academic conference for advertising scholars in the United States.

For more information, visit www.grady.uga.edu.