LITERATURE REVIEW
Knowledge of any research field needs sufficient understanding with the literature related to the area selected for study. The concept and measurement as to why customers patronize certain brands or stores has gained considerable attention from academicians, practitioners, and researchers in recent years. A brief review of literature would be a great help to the researchers in gaining an insight into the selected problem. It would help in gaining good background knowledge of the area under study. So it is practiced to review the literature available in the related area of the research study. In the area of the research study, related to the study about the factors customers’ preference in patronizing certain brands several studies, research papers, articles, are available. References of these earlier studies were found to be relevant to further analyze the present study.
In the early days most authors was focused loyalty as brand loyalty with respect to tangible goods (Cunningham, 1956; Day, 1969; Kostecki, 1994; Tucker, 1964) as cited in Caruana (2002). Dick and Basu (1994) said that loyalty is a more on favorable attitude towards a brand and shall create a repeat patronage. They were also recognized that low relative attitude with a low repeat purchase connotes absence of loyalty, while a low relative attitude with high repeat purchase may indicates spurious loyalty. But loyalty is interpreted as true loyalty rather than repeat purchasing behavior, which is the actual re-buying of brand, regardless of commitment (Bloemer & Kasper, 1995).
According to the work of Kim et al. (2007), brand loyalty is a deeply held commitment to re-buy or re-patronize a preferred product/service consistently in the future, thereby causing repetitive same-brand or same brand set purchasing, despite situational influences and marketing efforts having the potential