Abstract:

The car market has a remarquably high proportion of loyal customers. About 50 % of new car buyers choose for their new car the same brand as for the previous one. However, the economic and competitive situation may iead to an erosion of this figure. "Brand equity" may well be diminished in that sense. The goal of this paper is to analyze factors that lead to brand disloyalty. What are the elements in the consumer situation, in his permanent characteristics, in his product experience, in his general attitudes towards automobiles that are likely to lead him to switch to another brand? In order to analyze this problem, we have chosen to study a large number of variables, belonging to several categories (This paper is derived from a larger study on pre- purchase information gathering.). This allows us to assess the predictive power of multiple approaches. Of course, the price to be paid is the relatively small size of the sample, namely 1,008 recent purchasers of a new car. For the analysis reported in this paper, we excluded persons who had no previous car, as brand loyalty or disloyalty obviously cannot be observed in this case. This let us with 981 purchasers.