Determinants of brand loyalty in public higher education institutions in Malaysia: The mediating role of emotional brand attachment

Globalization has created countless opportunity and challenges for Malaysia Higher Education’s Institutions. In order to be competitive, these institutions need to adopt innovative ways of branding their institutions. One such strategy is by understanding and recognizing the new affective determinants of brand loyalty among international students along with other variables. Hence, the main objective of this study was to examine the relationship between university image, perceived teaching quality, acculturation, self-efficacy, emotional brand attachment and brand loyalty. This study also aimed to discover mediating effect of emotional brand attachment on the relationship between university images, perceived teaching quality, acculturation, self-efficacy, and brand loyalty. This study was developed based on Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) theory. The proportionate random sampling technique was applied to identify the number of respondents. 565 questionnaires were sent out through a survey method to the respondents which consist of three categories of public higher education in Malaysia. A total of 405 useable questionnaires was returned for further analysis using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The results of this study indicated that perceived teaching quality and emotional brand attachment have a direct effect on brand loyalty. Whereas, University image, self-efficacy and acculturation have an insignificant direct effect on brand loyalty. Furthermore, the findings revealed that emotional brand attachment was found to significantly mediate the relationship between university image, perceived teaching quality, acculturation, self-efficacy and brand loyalty. In general, the findings of this study provided support on the importance of the affective component as a formation of the student brand loyalty. Finally, this study proposes several recommendations for future research