European Journal of Business and Management www.iiste.org ISSN 2222-1905 (Paper) ISSN 2222-2839 (Online) Vol.6, No.25, 2014 174 Do Brand Personality Really Enhance Satisfaction and Loyalty Toward Brand? A Review of Theory and Empirical Research Alireza Roustasekehravani 1 * Abu Bakar Abdul Hamid 2 Azam haghkhah 1 Marzieh pooladireishahri 1 1. Faculty of Management (FM), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81300 Skudai, Malaysia 2. International Business School (IBS), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 54100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia * E-mail of the corresponding author: Alirezarousta@yahoo.com Abstract It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the role of brand loyalty in today’s competitive market. Brand loyalty is one of the most-cited concepts in marketing literature, and both academic and practitioners have accepted the range of benefits derived from it. Most firms attempt to measure satisfaction and loyalty for their brand, this is because the vital view whether a product successful or failed are customer loyalty. But, they do not think about vital influences to build satisfaction and loyalty. However, a major problem with this kind of effort is that measuring satisfaction and loyalty does not tell anybody how to achieve it. One of essential strategies to accomplish satisfaction and loyalty in branding strategy is brand personality. In the history of development loyalty, brand personality has been thought of as a key factor in brand theory; it is become more significant for companies. Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in the impact of brand personality on brand satisfaction and loyalty. Further, creating loyalty in today’s competitive market has become complicated due to standard similarity in consumer perception of product quality, increase in variety of superior brands and alternatives, low risk and high expectations of the customer's brand switching have completely changed. Based on the above issues, the present study was designed to determine the effect of brand personality as an important antecedent to brand loyalty in today's competitive market. The analysis is based on findings and theories from the consumer personality psychology and consumer behavior literature. These results provide important insights into the effects of brand personality in creating satisfaction and brand loyalty in order to have competitive advantage in today market. Keywords: Brand personality, Brand satisfaction, Brand loyalty, Competitive market. 1. Introduction In Today, brand loyalty plays a vital part in strategic management. How we can enhance brand loyalty of customers? This is one of the main challenges for most of professionals, which requires a lot of investigations. Also it brings double complexity of operationalization and conceptualization of loyalty concept (Louis and Lombart 2010). Loyalty to a brand is known as one of the most mentioned concepts in previous studies of marketing and practitioners and academics both have accepted its advantages. These days, brand loyalty has a key role in focus of strategic management. According to Jacoby and Kyner (1973) brand loyalty includes both attitude and behavior aspects of a customer. Organizations are considering managing and building loyalty remarkably to a certain brand. There were a lot of studies and also articles, which have been published, and they support the fact that loyalty results in more profitability (Kha 2008). Currently loyalty is known as the most optimum way that a firm can make sure it has long run profitability and survival (Baloglu 2002, Haghkhah et al. 2013). Reichheld (1994) explained that all of the satisfied customers necessarily are not loyal. Despite those researches which suggest satisfaction is important but it is not efficient for obtaining loyalty of customers (Mittal and Lassar 1998) also showing that a customer who is satisfied might not be loyal necessarily (Hennig‐Thurau and Klee 1997). Moreover, Reichheld et al. (2000) asserted that the satisfied customer in the survey demonstrated that from 60% to 80% might defect from many businesses. Thus, the main marketing objectives and goals for any type of business are creating, maintaining and also improving customer loyalty for their brands (Dick and Basu 1994). It was noted that those organizations which emphasize on understanding customer brand loyalty will have more profitability and long run customer retention, also minimize marketing expenses and improve their competitive advantage as a result (Aaker David 1991, Reichheld and Sasser 1990, Reichheld et al. 2000). So, it is remarkably necessary for firms to identify the process of developing customer brand loyalty and satisfaction in current competitive context of the market. Based on the current development within loyalty studies, it is mentioned organizations are concerned about the fact that the customers will be less loyal compared to past times (Dekimpe et al. 1997, Bennett and Rundel-Thiele 2005, Kapferer 2005). Schriver (1997) explained in United States, loyalty would not be the same as many years ago. Brand loyalty appears to be a little decreased by referring to many well-known national brands. It can be said that the accepting private brands is growing in current market context (Howell 2004, Dekimpe et al. 1997). Moreover, this context of severe competition as well as fast market penetration of new