Brand loyalty

  Apple is the world's second-largest mobile phone manufacturer after Samsung. “In February 2015, Apple became the first U.S. company to be valued at over US$700 billion. The company employs 116,000 full-time employees as of October 2016 and maintains 498 retail stores in 22 countries as of July 2017(Abrahams & Norfolk, 2017).” “One of the Apple mobile phones - iPhone 6 release in September of last year signed another successful product launch for Apple. Both the regular and "Plus" models combined exceeded 4 million pre-orders within 24 hours and sales of more than 10 million units in the first three days following release. The sense of brand loyalty cultivated by Apple for their customers plays an important role in the iPhone 6’s success(Ballard, 2015).” With the increase of options for customers and higher level of requirements for products, one of the challenging issues is troubling every companies in the market today. This issue is that how to communicate brands and their value with customer and make them accept it, in other words, it is becoming harder to attract new customers and foster their brand loyalty. As one the most influential mobile phone company in the world, Apple could not avoid the loss of customer’s loyalty entirely under a very competitive mobile phone market as well. To better understand the influence of this issue for Apple, we propose a research to identify and investigate the factors that affect brand loyalty. Problem Statement Although a series of Apple mobile phones such as iPhone 4,5 and 6 achieved impressive sales records in the past years, the trend that higher and higher cost are spent on attracting new customers and building brand loyalty shows that the investment on keeping brand loyalty still have the space to be improved for Apple. To address this, a management question has been identified in order to provide a framework for the following research proposal. Management question: What are the factors that impact the level of brand loyalty? For the convenience and operability of the research, we reviewed some literatures and summed up four major factors which are customer satisfaction, technology, service quality and brand symbolism to lead interviewees to answer questions. We also encourage interviewees to give us their opinion that we did not mention in the questions about these four factors. Research question: 1.To what extent do customer satisfaction, technology, service quality and brand symbolism impact the customers brand loyalty. 2. Give us your opinion about these four factors about affecting brand loyalty.