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The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant changes in many aspects especially towards small medium entrepreneurs (SMEs) as many of SMEs need to shut down their business due to movement control order (MCO) conducted by Malaysia government as SMEs cannot reach their customers. Previous studies show that having an effective digital marketing strategy in place might leave businesses vulnerable to severe setbacks towards SMEs. This research proposal aims to carry out and prove the possible potential effects and factors that influence digital marketing implementation towards online consumers in Selangor during COVID-19 pandemic. The methodology of this paper uses a descriptive qualitative approach by analyzing various previous literature on digital marketing scope of study. The sample size of the study is 235 respondents who were selected based on convenience sampling. The finding has discovered that there is a significant relationship between customer loyalty with implementation of digital marketing towards online consumers in Selangor during COVID-19 pandemic and there is a significance relationship between brand awareness and the implementation of digital marketing towards online consumer in Selangor during COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of this study is to analyze and explain the effects of cause-related marketing (CRM) campaigns on repurchase intentions in Surabaya, Indonesia, through the mediation of brand awareness, consumer attitudes and corporate image. The study design used a survey and data collection through questionnaires. The unit of analysis includes consumers who bought Aqua mineral water and know of the Aqua campaigns CRM program buy 1 for 10 who live in the city of Surabaya. The research hypothesis was tested using variance-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) with Partial Least Square (PLS). The results show that the CRM Campaigns directly had no significant effect on repurchase intentions. Interestingly, the effect of CRM Campaigns on repurchase intentions mediated by brand awareness, consumer attitudes and company image can significantly influence consumer repurchase intentions.

© 2017 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved and by the authors. The aim of the study was to examine how consumers integrate into brand communities on social media network sites (SNSs) and how it affects overall satisfaction of social media sites users among students. The study depends on the service-dominant logic (SDL) to develop the constructs for hypotheses testing. The study used a cross-sectional survey research design. The data were collected using a web-based survey of university of Nairobi Students. In all, a total of 608 students participated in the survey. The data was analyzed using structural equation modeling with AMOS software. The results revealed that frequency of usage of SNSs and duration of usage positively affect the self - perceived relevance of SNSs. Also, the self-perceived relevance leads to building brand community which finally leads to customer satisfaction. The research was limited to only students of Nairobi and selecting students in itself, which is a limitation as well as limiting it to university of Nairobi. The younger or the millennial are not the only users of SNSs. We have older generations as well, who also use SNSs for various activities such as professional development among others. Understanding why consumers of social media network site would integrate brand community is seminal for both local and foreign firms doing business in a developing country. This would enable marketing practitioners to craft marketing strategies best for community brand building.

This study empirically investigates the mediating effect of brand satisfaction on the relationship between brand personality and brand loyalty among Malaysian customers toward local automobile brands (Proton and Perodua). Four hypotheses were developed to test hypothesizing relationships between brand personality and brand satisfaction on brand loyalty. The data were collected from consumers of automobile brands in north Malaysia peninsula from three states which were Kedah, Penanag, and Perlis. This study applies partial least squares to a sample of 458 customers to test hypothesized relationships. The findings indicate that brand personality and brand satisfaction appear to have a positive and significant relationship with brand loyalty. Moreover, brand satisfaction was found to be a mediator in the relationship between brand personality and brand loyalty. The results are compared with earlier findings and implications for further research are discussed.

Green environmental issues have been of topical interest to both researchers and industrialists for some time now. Research on green brands is relatively limited, especially in developing countries, such as Ghana. This study is therefore designed to determine the relationship between customer awareness of green brand issues and their everyday purchase intentions. Using quantitative techniques, the study interviewed 316 people, conveniently selected from various shopping points in Accra. The study found that, the overwhelming majority of respondents though familiar with green issues did not concern themselves with green issues in their everyday purchase decisions. Again, majority of respondents (54%) familiar with environmental issues confirmed they would not switch from their preferred brands to less fancied brands even if the less fancied brands were more environmentally friendly. It was also confirmed in the study that price, brand name and convenience, performed better than customer concerns for green issues, in influencing respondents’ purchase decisions. It would therefore be strategically significance if advocates, policy makers and business leaders reduce the cost of green products to the final consumer, intensive public education campaigns, coupled with strategic brand building efforts to enhance the level of green brand consumption.

In highly competitive markets, building brand equity has become one of the first priorities for many organizations as it brings several benefits and reputation for them. Past researches have acknowledged that consumers look for brands which provide them with differential values through innovative product and service features. However, despite the importance of product innovation in determining an organization’s success, very limited studies have intended to examine its effect on brand equity. In the present study, we aim to examine the effect of product innovation on brand equity in Malaysian automotive market. The data were collected from 287 passenger cars owners through self-administered questionnaire at several shopping malls in northern Malaysia. The findings revealed that product innovation had significant positive effect on overall brand equity and its dimensions namely; brand awareness, brand loyalty, brand image, and brand leadership. Based on the results of this study, several implications are discussed to enlighten our knowledge on important innovation activities that could develop favorable brand equity. Finally, limitations and future research suggestions are highlighted to gain better insights on brand equity development.

In the recent years, retail industry in Iran has faced an increasing competition and this has encouraged the managers of chain stores to find ways to differentiate their own companies. One of the influential factors in this field is brand equity. Concerning this issue, the aim of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of sale promotions on the brand equity of ETKA chain stores. Therefore, a sample of 500 people among the customers of these stores in Tehran was examined. The achieved information obtained from the questionnaire was analyzed through structural equation modeling. The results showed that monetary and non-monetary promotions could influence on brand association, brand awareness and the perceived quality. On the other hand, it came out that brand association and the perceived quality are influential on brand loyalty. At last, a few suggestions were presented based on the results of this research.

Article history: Received January 22, 2014 Accepted 7 July 2014 Available online July 8 2014 This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of multimedia advertisement on building brand equity. The proposed study uses two questionnaires, one for multimedia advertisement, which consists of 17 questions and the other one for measuring brand equity. The survey is applied among 384 randomly selected customers who do their daily businesses with banks located in province of Kordestan, Iran. Using Pearson correlation as well as linear regression techniques, the study has determined a positive and meaningful relationship between these two variables. In our survey, word of mouth advertisement seems to have the highest impact on brand equity followed by having seminars. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received January 14, 2014 Accepted 10 June 2014 Available online June 16 2014 The purpose of this paper is to determine and prioritize factors influencing on brand equity in consumer’s point of view for a case study of Samsung appliance consumers in city of Tehran, Iran. The study investigates the effects of four factors in terms of the customer's perspective, price, advertisement, family and brand image, by dimensions of brand equity, perceived quality, brand awareness, brand association, brand loyalty, on brand equity. The research method is based on a descriptive-survey research. The questionnaire includes Samsung consumers in city of Tehran, Iran. To test the hypotheses, SPSS and LISREL software packages are used. For data analysis, descriptive statistics and inferential statistical tests including structural equation modeling and path analysis are used. The results of the survey have indicated that family and brand image influence positively on brand equity but the effects of advertisement and price on brand equity were not confirmed. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

This research evaluates the effect of perceived value on brand popularity and brand loyalty for some organizations in business-to-business (B2B) domain under the effect of risk and e-service quality. The practical relationships among six different kinds of risks including performance, social, financial, time, psychological and safety with consideration of quality in e-commerce business on customer’s perceived value are evaluated and the effects of this perception of value on consequences of perceived value are measured. In this study, using the partial least square method as well as gathering the information of some Iranian firms that use electronic services, the study finds that there was a significant relationship between various types of risks and perceived value. There is also considerable influence of perceived value on satisfaction, brand popularity, and brand loyalty.

Article history: Received July 28, 2013 Received in revised format 20 November 2013 Accepted 4 January 2014 Available online January 6 2014 This paper presents an empirical study to investigate the effect of brand equity on customer’s adoption of electronic banking. The proposed study uses a standard questionnaire for measuring brand equity, which consists of five items including brand associate, brand awareness, quality perception and brand loyalty. The study also uses another questionnaire, which measures electronic acceptance and both questionnaires are designed in Likert scale. Cronbach alphas for brand equity and electronic acceptance are measured as 0.83 and 0.75, which are above the acceptance level of 0.70. Therefore, we can confirm the validity of both questionnaires. The study is implemented among 384 regular customers of one of Iranian banks, randomly and using Spearman correlation ratio as well as stepwise regression techniques, the study has detected a positive and meaningful relationship between brand equity and customer’s adoption on electronic banking.

Article history: Received October 28, 2013 Received in revised format 25 November 2013 Accepted 15 January 2014 Available online January 18 2014 Brand plays essential role on the success of most organizations and it has been considered as organizational assets. Therefore, brand management is important in today’s structure of organizations. A good brand helps gain new customer and future preferences, which leads to customer retention. Brand loyalty is one of the most important components of brand management. It can raise firm’s market share and it has close relationship with firm’s return of investment and profits. This research tries to answer this question and finds out more about the relationship between customer satisfaction, trust, brand equity, brand image and customer loyalty. The study uses a sample of 384 regular customers who use insurance services in Iran. Using Pearson correlation ratio as well as structural equation modeling, the study has detected positive and meaningful relationship between brand equity and other factors such as customer satisfaction, trust, etc. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received May 4, 2014 Accepted 24 September 2014 Available online September 29 2014 This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of brand power experiences on power of brand in food industry. The study deigns a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 23 questions, distributes it among 208 randomly selected people who purchase foods from three different food chains in city of Tehran, Iran. Using structural equation modeling, the study has examined the effects of six factors influence the most in our survey including Brand loyalty, Physical attributes, pricing factors, functional characteristics, brand association and brand position. The results of our survey indicate that pricing factors and brand position were the most important influential factors followed by functional characteristics and physical attributes. However, the survey does not confirm the effects of brand loyalty and brand association on brand power. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Power of brand Brand loyalty Food industry Pricing factor Physical attributes

Article history: Received January 4, 2014 Accepted 1 June 2014 Available online June 3 2014 This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of sales related factors on brand equity. The study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among all 353 sales representatives who work for a dairy producer in province of Mazandaran, Iran. Using principal component analysis, seven variables including qualification criteria, motivation, personality, empowering sales representative, information size, personal characteristics and sales interest in job on brand equity are extracted. The implementation of structural equation modeling has confirmed that there were positive and meaningful relationships between seven factors and brand equity. The highest impact belongs to empowering sales representative followed by qualification criteria, quantity of information, personality and sales motivation. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received July 28, 2013 Accepted 14 January 2014 Available online February 27 2014 This paper examines the effect of the service brand on the customer value–loyalty process. The study includes the traditional effect of brand image plus three additional influences, which reflects the broader service perspective including company image, employee trust, and company trust. Using survey data of a sample of 385 bank customers, the analysis indicates there is a direct influence of some of the perspectives of the brand on customers' perceptions of value. The results indicate that brand image, organization image, trust to firm influence positively on quality of services. In addition, brand image, organization image, quality of services and trust to firm influence on customer’s perspective where quality of services maintains the lowest impact and corporate image has the highest impact on customer’s perspective. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received May 12, 2013 Received in revised format 12 August 2013 Accepted 28 September 2013 Available online October 6 2013 This paper presents an investigation on the role of brand image on customer loyalty on rubber industry. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 27 questions, distributes it among some Iranian experts in rubber industry and analyzes it based on principal component analysis. During the survey, the number questions are reduced to 23. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.812 and Kaiser-MeyerOlkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Approx. Chi-Square are 0.671 and 2375, respectively. Based on the results of our survey, we have derived six factors including penetration strategy, infrastructure characteristics, competitive pricing, target marketing strategy, communication strategy and market characteristics. © 2013 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received May 15, 2013 Received in revised format 17 August 2013 Accepted 18 August 2013 Available online August 21 2013 This paper presents a study to investigate the effects of perception and marketing expenditures as well as financial and non-financial promotions on brand equity. The proposed study of this paper prepares a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among regular customers of three types of Shampoo in city of Tehran, Iran. The implementation of structural equation modeling for the proposed study of this paper has been accomplished based on LISREL software. The results of the survey on testing various hypotheses indicate that perception on marketing expenditure, financial as well as non-financial promotion and word of mouth advertisement influence positively on brand awareness and negatively on non-financial promotions (α=0.01). In addition, brand awareness influences positively on perception quality (α=0.01). Brand awareness as well as brand associate also influence on brand loyalty (α=0.01). © 2013 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

The paper investigates the factors influencing customers choice of telecommunication network in Ghana. The survey design was employed to enable the researchers perform statistical analysis. Questionnaire consisting of Likert scale question was used to collect the primary data. Multiple regression analysis was performed to ascertain the factors influencing customers’ choice of telecommunication networks. The study found six factors that influence customers to choose a particular network. These factors include; brand awareness, brand image, perceived quality, price, convenience and brand loyalty. The study concludes that all the six factors contribute to the factors that drive consumer choice of telecommunications service in Ghana.

Article history: Received March 12, 2013 Received in revised format 10 June 2013 Accepted 22 June 2013 Available online June 25 2013 Brands are considered as valuable assets of a company both economically and strategically. Thus, having customers who are loyal to a brand is one of the main goals of businesses companies. Identifying and anticipating the customers’ needs are vital to the enterprises gaining competitive advantage and market segmentation. Maintaining and enforcing customers’ loyalty is a strategic challenge for companies seeking to keep and promote their competitive status in the market. High brand loyalty of the customers generates competitive advantage for the company and it increases the income and decreases the costs of marketing. In addition to increasing the market share, loyalty allows to ask for higher prices compared with its competitors. This study seeks to investigate the factors influencing customer loyalty to sport brands. The statistical population of this research was Tehran city. Using simple cluster sampling, 502 customers of four known brand sports, i.e. Nike, Puma, Adidas, Reebok, and Fila were chosen. Furthermore, a questionnaire, which assessed seven variables including reputations, brand name, brand image, brand loyalty, customer satisfaction, promotion and the price was used and the hypotheses were analyzed using statistical tests such as KolmogorovSmirnov test (K-S test), Spearman correlation, simultaneous linear regression and binomial test. The findings suggested that the brand name has a strong correlation with brand loyalty. Moreover, variables such as reputation, brand image, customer satisfaction, price and promotions also have positive and significant effect on the brand loyalty. © 2013 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

The present exploratory study aims to find critical components of retail brand among some retail stores. The study seeks to build a brand name in retail level and looks to find important factors affecting it. Customer behavior is largely influenced when the first retail customer experience is formed. These factors have direct impacts on customer experience and satisfaction in retail industry. The proposed study performs an empirical investigation on two well-known retain stores located in city of Tehran, Iran. Using a sample of 265 people from regular customers, the study uses factor analysis and extracts four main factors including related brand, product benefits, customer welfare strategy and corporate profits using the existing 31 factors in the literature.

Article history: Received May 10, 2012 Received in Revised form June, 26, 2012 Accepted 2 August 2012 Available online August 8 2012 Tourism destination brand equity is defined as all assets (or debts) of brands provided with name and symbol of tourism destination to make changes in value services of experiences. In many cases, brand equity is more than physical assets. This survey performs an investigation to identify effective factors in tourism destination equity, cause and affects relationships, and proposes a model for perceived value of tourism destination. The proposed study is performed in one of free islands named Gheshm. The preliminary results indicate that there is a positive relationship between tourism destination brand awareness and destination brand equity, tourism destination brand image, destination brand equity and tourism destination brand loyalty. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received April 17, 2012 Accepted 11 June 2012 Available online June 12 2012 Social networks are online gathering places for people who would like to share their interests and activities. In this context, advertising through social networks is one of the most important topics in the field of marketing and brand that has been considered only in few studies. This study examines the impact of advertising on brand equity through social networks in the beverage industry (PepsiCo). This research study was to survey and collect data from the a standard questionnaire. PepsiCo brand, which is a well known beverage industry worldwide is selected for the proposed study of this paper. Thus, all customers of Pepsi products in city of Tehran are considered as statistical research community and a sample size of 385 people is selected for the proposed study. In order to analyze the data, we use structural equations method and certified factor analysis. The results of our survey indicate that advertisement on social networks has a positive impact in this industry. Based on the results of our survey, we realize that there are some positive relationship between social network advertisement and quality perception, brand loyalty, brand awareness and brand association when the level of significance is one percent. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received December 1, 2011 Received in Revised form February, 14, 2011 Accepted 24 March 2012 Available online March 25 2012 During the past few years, there have been increasing discussions on the impact of brand in business units. Many researchers have concluded that the best way to increase sales is to introduce the brand in society. In this study, we consider the impact of brand identity on increasing product loyalty in one of Iranian dairy products. The proposed study is implemented in city of Tehran by choosing 475 people. The proposed model is analyzed using structural equation model and factor analysis. The results indicate that there is a direct positive relationship between brand and loyalty and a powerful brand could help setup a long-term relationship between customer and firm, which leads to brand loyalty. In other words, brand identity influences perception value, customer satisfaction, brand trust while perception value influences customer satisfaction and brand trust. In addition, customer satisfaction influences brand trust, brand trust influences customer loyalty and finally brand identity indirectly influences customer loyalty. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received October 1, 2011 Received in Revised form November, 14, 2011 Accepted 15 February 2012 Available online 27 February 2012 There are many evidences to believe that customers select their products based on brand name. Products also maintain their own characteristics, which make them differentiable from others. In this paper, we present an empirical study to determine important factors influencing customers' purchasing intend for cellular phones in capital city of Iran, Tehran. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire consists of 16 questions and distribute them among 428 people. The results of the study show that there are some positive relationships between exclusive name and quality perception, between exclusive name and word of mouth advertisement, between quality perception and fidelity, between word of mouth advertisement and brand name and between brand name image and brand name. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.