Brand Personality and Customer Emotional Brand Attachment: Studyon Mobile Phone Market in Polonnaruwa District in Sri Lanka

Abstract

In the current condition, Sri Lankan mobile phone industry has emphasized the importance of emotional brand attachment as a form of customer loyalty. Brand personality has been recognized as a deep-rooted brand element that triggers consumer’sultimate brand choice. The study is focused to examine the impact of brand personality on emotional brand attachment attending to the market failures of some competitive brands in the current mobile phone market in Sri Lanka. Some of the brands have not updated the operating system by using android but other of the industry make changes. The main objective is to recognize the impact of brand personality and its dimensions onthe emotional brand attachment of the mobile phone industry in Sri Lanka. In this study,five independent variables were tested under the construct of brand personality. The population of this study was all mobile phone users in Polonnaruwa District. The hypothesized relationships were tested using survey responses from a sample of 310 individual mobile phone users and respondents were selected administrating simple random sampling techniques. A self-administrated questionnaire with a 5-point Likert scale was utilized to collect the primary data and analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics with the support of statistical package SPSS 21. Cronbach’s alpha values confirmed the reliability of the data. The results revealed a significant positive relationship between the independent and dependent variables. The major findings indicate that there is a significant impact of brand sincerity, brand sophistication and, brand ruggedness on the emotional brand attachment while brand excitement and brand competence are insignificant to determine the emotional brand attachment. The regression model confirmed that brand personality, brand sincerity and, brand sophistication contributed to the emotional brand attachment in this market. The findings of the study could be used by the industry, academics, and future researchers for their domains. Keywords: Brand Personality, emotional brand attachment, mobile phone mar