Brand Loyalty and Tourists Destination

Africa is known for its rich endowment in natural features that are quite interesting. The management body of the regions have become interested in looking for means improving the economy of small business people who operate around this tourist sites. They conducted a pilot study to screen the issues that could help develop these areas. Through the pre-study, the retailers raised the issues of brand loyalty and tourist purchasing decisions and their impact on the development of the rural retailers. Tourist destination was also thought to of impact on the development of the retailers in Africa. This study will be based on the above-mentioned factors concerning African coast.

Brand loyalty in a tourists destination is much like a new field in the industry and there need for thorough research in this field to understand tourists’ behavior so as to develop the local retails to meet the tourists’ expectations. The retailers have branded their products so as to make their businesses attractive and unique. Through branding, local retailers have realized that they are getting a larger number of tourists (Jules, 2013). An important component of loyalty building process is through the marketing and management of service delivery with certain concern to brand loyalty factors to tourists in rural areas. Destination and brand loyalty in this context have been viewed as some drive force that encourage leisure shopping.

Destination and brand loyalty can be said to be person attitude construct and it can be ruled out a tourists’ destination is guided by his past experiences in that place (Rogerson, 2013). Destination loyalty has gained more attraction because it is vital in destination marketing and management for a prolonged time as competition and loyal tourists’ significance becomes crucial. The main factors that influence destination loyalty are destination brand image, brand awareness, destination brand quality and completion in the destination. Most researchers have based customer loyalty in many different settings. Leisure shopping has been viewed as a source capital for many retailers specifically in areas where these people tour.

Quality time spent by tourists around some areas play a part in creating brand loyalty from these people who buy from them often. Studies show that tourists use recommendation to visit a place and also in purchasing of the products availed. Brands aid a customer to differentiate products, help the buyer to determine whether to buy the items that satisfy his personal needs, evaluate them and make his decision. Most local retails in the rural areas lack these services hence experience low sales. Customers perceive value, brand, customer purchase habit, and commitment to producing quality goods are some of the factors that influence the brand loyalty (Kibara, Odhiambo & Njuguna, 2012). A tourists’ buying behavior is influenced by persona, social, cultural and psychological factors. These four make a visitor to develop a product and brand preference.  Though marketers don’t control the factors that influence tourists buying behavior, understanding what the visitors need can have an impact on structuring the retail marketing strategies that please the tourists (Horner & Swarbrooke, 2016).

Factors Influencing Brand Loyalty in Rural Areas

In the past years, the importance and contribution of tourism on the world economy has been greatly acknowledged and talked about. Up to today, not many researches has been conducted to portray tourists purchase behaviours in the local businesses around the tourist centres. This study will seek to investigate the drivers of tourists purchasing loyalty when they visit the African coastal region. The objectives of the study will be to determine the drivers of tourist’s brand loyalty (leisure shopping) and its contribution towards the rural development and examining what factors that may influence tourists purchasing habits from this local retails handcrafts.

Africa is one of the leading tourist centres in the world. Tourism contributes much to the continents GDP as lots of foreigners tour the region with the view of enjoying its wide range of features.

Africa is one of the leading tourists’ destinations in the world. The number of tourists who visit the continent is constantly increasing every year (Látková & Vogt, 2012). As a result marketing, many local retailers have cropped in the rural areas where these tourist centers are to make use of available local resources. Locations which can develop and market tourism as well as they develop their small businesses and create employment as well. African tourist boards have witnessed a high large number of tourists’ inflow from time to time. Most of this tourists come from UK, USA, Italy and Germany respectively according to research. The tourist attractions sites in Africa are many in number with the Coastal region being among the top where tourists’ tour during summer to enjoy the sandy beaches, a wide variety of wildlife and physical features amongst others. Most of these sites are located in the local regions that have seen people from this areas come up with business ideas to earn them a living. However, the ideas have not worked out perfectly and hence the need to come up with strategies such branding which will see the local retailers have specific and persistent customers (Látková & Vogt, 2012). Leisure shopping has triggered a lot of development around the African region as many people have ventured in the niche identified through tourists in the region

1. Does tourists’ brand loyalty have any influence in the development of retailers in rural areas around the tourist’s sites?
2. How do tourists purchase behavior affect the development of local retailers around the tourists’ attraction centers?

This chapter will focus on empirical literature from other researchers who conducted studies regarding drivers of brand loyalty of tourists on retail development. It will also comprise of the theoretical literature review.

Brand loyalty is a positive based habit towards a certain brand and is partitioned into three dimensions (Guenzi, Johnson, & Castaldo, 2009). The first is the emotive tendency towards a certain brand. This tendency is learned by the consumer from either from past experiences with other brands or information from those who have experienced it. The second dimension of a brand loyalty is the evaluating tendency towards the brand. It refers to a favouring or biased evaluation of the brand following a criterion that is in line with the definition of the utility to the consumer. The evaluative tendency includes the utilitarian attitudes and instrumental attitudes (Neumark, Zhang, & Ciccarella, 2008). It is learned by the consumer either from past experiences, non-experiential or informational sources. The third dimension of brand loyalty is a behavioural tendency toward the brand. This refers to positively biased responses towards the brand on means of procurement, buying and consuming activities (Neirotti, 2012). The theory also explains why consumers are loyal to certain products or brands.       

Importance of Tourism in African Economy

Loyalty can help a buyer to avoid or reduce risk. Consumer loyalty is high in people who perceive considerable risks in a brand, product or store selection but who have already found a solution satisfying their problems. There is a high number of alternatives that can be used to satisfy similar problems.

Loyalty is approximated in the behavioural, attitudinal and composite approach. Different factors have constituted to getting to brand loyalty. Brand awareness is what people know or think about the destination. Destination awareness is the likelihood that a destination will look like what tourists had set in mind. (Neirotti, 2012) Defines it as the consumer’s ability to recognizing or identifying the brand. The brand recognition portrays the tourist’s ability to affirm exposure to the brand before.  

Brand awareness is necessary for the brand to attain its equity to maintain any product or service that is the same to both. It is the first option as it has an influence on the brand’s width and depth loyalty (Pillay & Rogerson, 2013). Tourists are not able to select their destinations if they are not aware of the brand of products offered at different destinations as stated by other researchers (Ghosh, Tripathi & Kumar, 2010). Tourists have a good feeling when they are familiar with the products and services that present at the outskirts of the tourist attraction sites. Brand awareness can influence tourists’ perceptions as the feel more comfortable if they already know the brand. Studies show that destination image can be traced a long way back.

Brand quality is the consumers criticizing the product or services connecting it to the desired purpose. Other researchers define quality as the end point infrastructure affecting brand performance. Reliable and responsive services enhance a destination competitive advantage. Markets are constantly insisting that brand value is a line of research of late as current firms are interested in creating value for their targeted consumers. Keller (2008) defines consumer brand knowledge as every descriptive and evaluative brand-related information that exists in a consumer’s memory. Brand knowledge incorporates all sort of personal meaning that consumers associate with the brand.

This involves five phases: first, Need recognition: – the retailers should recognize the needs of the tourists as well as how these needs can be satisfied, secondly data search where the tourist looks for data about the product and service (Mok, Sparks & Kadampully, 2013). Thirdly evaluating other options: – after getting the needed knowledge about the product, the consumer evaluates several options by what its need satisfying power, features and its quality. Fourthly, purchase decision: after evaluating the alternatives the consumer purchases the suitable product. There are also opportunities to push forward the buying decision due to some reasons (Chang, 2014). In such a case the marketer must try to find out the reasons to try to solve them either by availing sufficient information to consumers or by guaranteeing the product to the customer. Lastly, post purchase behavior; after purchasing the product or service, tourists will either be satisfied or dissatisfied. If the consumer is not okay, he will be disappointed and if he is satisfied he will be happy (Goodall & Ashworth, 2013). If satisfied, the tourists will tell others about the services or products he received from that firm.           

Research Hypothesis

This process is affected by factors such as social factors, reference groups, member groups, and aspiration: physical that influence the morale, attitude, learning and beliefs, social class, cultural factors, economic levels, personal lifestyle and other people culture among others (Hattingh, Russo, Basorun & Wamelen, 2012).

From the theoretical review and the review of the two factors, it is evident brand loyalty through leisure shopping increases the possibility that a tourist will continuous buy this brand as needs arise (Wakefield, Germain, & Henriksen, 2008). Development of brand loyalty in tourists reduces their risks and reduces the time taken buying the product. The degree of brand loyalty for product differs from one product category to another; that is brand recognition happens when a consumer know the existence of the brand and sees it as an alternative to buying his brand not present or if the other present are not familiar to the customer; brand preference is a strong degree of brand loyalty (Guenzi, Johnson, & Castaldo, 2009).

According to Mossberg (2007), tourist will prefer one brand over competitive offerings and will buy if present, but will also accept substitute products available if it is strong enough to earn the least degree of loyalty. Although brand loyalty is challenging to build, is makes an important contribution to sustainable competitive advantage (LeHew, & Wesley, 2007). Retailers around tourist centers in the African coastal tourist’s site should put into measures these two factors into practice among others if they have to witness development as a result of leisure shopping in the area (Rogerson, 2013).

A research design is a framework for collecting, approximating and analyzing the data about the research hypothesis formulated. The core objective of this research is to determine means through that rural retailer around tourist attraction sites can develop as a result of the tourists who tour their area. The research design to be adopted in this study is cross-sectional in nature and follows the casual research design where data is collected changing the environment. This means that nothing will be structured and explorative research design to examine datasets and check for any relations between variables. The study will engage in collecting both qualitative and quantitative data at the same time using questionnaires to determine the impact of the perceived factors affecting brand loyalty of tourism in rural retails around the sites.

Variables in research projects are used to estimate how the results will be on adjusting the dependent and independent variables. The gender and age of respondents will be the independent variables. These will be grouped into two nominal categories that are male and female and recorded following the ascending order of their ages. The independent variable will be the level that these two variables affect retail development in the tourist areas. The tourists will be interviewed on how they feel the quality of services and products offered by the retailers are. To measure the level, a scale of 1-5 will be structured, and the respondents will choose appropriately where they feel like the level of African coastal retailer businesses is. The retailers will be asked on the measures they put in place to satisfy tourists’ needs and if they use branding and gather information on what the tourists want. This will be achieved through open and closed questionnaire and interviews. The results of the responses will be shown using descriptive statistics table, and they will also be given a chance to put down what they think should be done to improve the development level at the African coastal region retailers.

Effect of Tourism on Rural Development

This research proposal focuses on all the tourists and rural retailers around the African coastal beaches. Therefore, this population is huge as many people are investing in this area as the number of tourists increases as time goes by. Since the population being targeted is large, sampling will be done to come up with a representative sample that will be used for this study. A large number of population will be sub-grouped into regarding age and gender and the regions they come from. By dividing the population into subgroups, stratified sampling will, therefore, be used to obtain the representative. The sample will be obtained by the using the Sloven’s formula:

n = N / (1+Ne2)

Where n represents the sample, N- target population and e the margin error. The survey will consist of questionnaires that will have both open and closed questions. There will be interviews so that points that are not clear will be clarified.

Assurances will be made in the research study information sheet that will be given to all potential study respondents in all stages of the data collection that participation in the study is voluntary and that the identities of the respondents would be kept confidential. Also, those who will be interviewed will be promised that their identities won’t be portrayed.

Informed consent of the participants will also be ensured in this study. This means that the participants will be made aware of any risks and dangers that may arise as a result of taking part in the study.  

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