Corporate Brand Image and Customer Satisfaction on Loyalty: An Empirical Study of Starbucks Coffee in Taiwan

Abstract

Corporate image has been assessed as an important antecedent of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Corporate brand is vital because positive corporate brands help companies achieving higher performance, such as sales. Marketing exists to deliver more value to satisfy customers as well as build a long-term and mutually profitability relationship with customers. If a firm’s products or services do not satisfy or meet the customer’s needs and wants, all the strategies are insufficient. With loyal customers, companies can have higher market share and reduce the operating cost. An improvement of 5 percent in customer retention leads to an increase of 25 percent to 75 percent in profit. It costs more than five times as much to obtain a new customer than to keep an existing one. This initial study was from relevant literature, then set up research structure and hypotheses. Survey was employed, and respondents were from the customers of Starbucks Coffee in Taipei area. There were 199 usable questionnaires to analyze descriptive statistics, reliability, validity, and SEM model. The research found that corporate brand image significantly affects customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction has strong impact on customer loyalty for the sample. Therefore, firms have to specifically focus on these factors in order to build a long-term and mutually profitability relationship with a customer and create loyalty as competitive advantages in the market.