Predicting Disloyalty to a Search Engine: The Role of Satisfaction, Brand Relationship, Reputation and the Search Engines Features

Brand loyalty is helping companies secure customers in the long run and is a widely research concept. Brand disloyalty can be producing the opposite results than brand loyalty and can be equally important. However, very limited work has been published to brand disloyalty. Using data collected online from 495 individuals in the UK, this research is investigating the antecedents of online brand disloyalty to a search engine. The results indicate that the best predictor of brand disloyalty in this context is the brand reputation, which reduces it, while the characteristics of the search engine (including each complexity) and the communication that individuals receive and provide to a search engine is increasing the loyalty to this search engine.