How Resistance to Change Affects on Brand Loyalty in Consumables Market

A search for the perfect ingredients to achieve brand loyal consumers has been popular focus in brand literature and studies have proposed numerous brand loyalty patterns. But how much of the brand loyalty is explained by resistance to change? As the typical human tendency is to strive for consistency and status quo rather than continuously look for new and alternative behavior it is likely that brand loyalty is partly explained by resistance to change. This paper empirically tests the role of resistance to change in brand loyalty in the consumables market. We test two models, first with brand satisfaction and brand trust as assumed antecedents of attitudinal and behavioral brand loyalty, and a second model in which resistance to change is added to explain attitudinal and behavioral brand loyalty. Attitudinal brand loyalty is considered as an antecedent to behavioral brand loyalty in both models.

Our data included 808 effective responses that were collected through an online questionnaire link posted on a Finnish confectionary company’s Facebook wall. First a confirmatory factor analysis was conducted. All factor loadings are greater than the general threshold limit of 0.5. In addition, discriminant validity is supported, as the square root of Average variance extracted (AVE) of each construct is greater than the correlation with other constructs. Moreover, composite reliability statistics indicate adequate internal consistency of the constructs.

Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized relationships between the constructs. First we calculated the results for Model 1. All paths except the relationship between brand trust and behavioral brand loyalty were found significant. Brand satisfaction was found to positively influence on attitudinal brand loyalty (0.28) and behavioral brand loyalty (0.40). Attitudinal brand loyalty was found indeed as an antecedent to behavioral loyalty (0.49). However, when exploring the results of Model 2 the positions of the loyalty antecedents are shifted. In Model 2 the effect of brand satisfaction to attitudinal loyalty fell out of significance and resistance to change rose as a significant construct to explain attitudinal brand loyalty (0.60). On one hand this brings up an interesting discussion whether consumers’ attitudinal loyalty is connected to the brand or does it occur just because of their embedded habits? On the other hand, when consumers are resistant to change, are they actually so emotionally attached to brand that they become attitudinally brand loyal? This result brings more light to the debate of brand loyalty among consumable goods. It has been stated that attitudinal measures might not be reasonable in brand loyalty research among consumable goods. Nevertheless, in our research setting resistance to change is found to be a very significant factor to attitudinal loyalty.

The comparison of the two models generated interesting results. Due to Model 2, we found a new pattern to explain brand loyalty in the consumable goods market. In addition the goodness of-fit –measures for Model 2 (χ ² = 445.890; df = 80; p < 0.001; RMSEA = 0.075; CFI = 0.95) achieved better results than Model 1 (χ ² = 394.863; df = 48; p < 0.001; RMSEA = 0.095; CFI = 0.94). Since the effect of resistance to change in loyalty has sprung only a few studies the results of this paper encourage for more empirical testing.