Paper Title
BRAND LOYALTY MEASUREMENT: SCALE DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION

Abstract
Abstract - Brand loyalty is the core component of brand equity (Aaker, 1991) and basis for ‘developing a sustainable competitive advantage’ (Dick &Basu, 1994, p. 99). Scholars argue that building brand loyalty should be the top priority of marketing efforts and relationship marketing for many firms (Evanschitzky et al., 2012; Khamitov, Wang, & Thomson, 2019; Palmatier et al., 2006), because loyal customers buy more products, bring in new customers, spread positive online and offline word-of-mouth (WOM) or may even be brand advocators and ambassadors, and may not be easily lured aways by competing brands (Kandampully, Zhang, &Bilgihan, 2015; Šerić&Praničević, 2018) and company can also benefit from higher sales revenue, lower marketing costs, and brand extension opportunity (Aaker, 1991; Keller, 2005). Ever since the brand loyalty concept was first introduced in the 1940’s (Schultz & Block, 2012), it has been studied extensively, especially during the last three decades. However, there has been little research into the measurement of loyalty (Knox and Walker, 2001; Velázquez, Saura, & Molina 2011). Moreover, Choice of loyalty measurement instrument is somewhat arbitrary, making it hard to generalize research findings across studies (Pan, Sheng, and Xie, 2012). Without a widely accepted measurement scale, the analysis of loyalty is at best piecemeal. The purpose of this research is to develop a brand loyalty measurement scale using a large scale research. Keywords (3-5) - Brand Loyalty, Customer Loyalty, Measurement Scale