Behavioral intention has attracted much attention from both the industry and academia. As it is equated with customers\u27 conative loyalty, investigating behavioral intention can give implications for tourism businesses on how to raise consumers’ loyalty and thus lead to profitable development. To have a better understanding of the antecedents of behavioral intention, this study conducted 350 surveys and used structural equation modeling to test the relationships among perceived value, satisfaction, brand love, and behavioral intention. This study found that satisfaction and brand love have similar effects on intention to recommend while the effects of brand love on intention to revisit are much greater than that of satisfaction. Additionally, this study confirmed that perceived value can be used as a predictor of satisfaction and brand love

Choi, Hwan-Suk Chris, Ph.D.

Huang, Shuyue

Joppe, Marion, Ph.D.

Shen, Ye (Sandy)

English

ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

University of Massachusetts AmherstScholarWorks@UMass AmherstTTRA Canada 2016 Conference TTRA CanadaFall 9-28-2016Examining the Role of Satisfaction and Brand Lovein Generating Behavioral IntentionYe (Sandy) ShenUniversity of Guelph, yshen04@uoguelph.caShuyue HuangUniversity of GuelphHwan-Suk Chris Choi Ph.D.University of GuelphMarion Joppe Ph.D.University of GuelphFollow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/ttracanada_2016_conferencePart of the Tourism and Travel CommonsThis Refereed academic paper for presentation is brought to you for free and open access by the TTRA Canada at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. Ithas been accepted for inclusion in TTRA Canada 2016 Conference by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For moreinformation, please contact scholarworks@library.umass.edu.Shen, Ye (Sandy); Huang, Shuyue; Choi, Hwan-Suk Chris Ph.D.; and Joppe, Marion Ph.D., "Examining the Role of Satisfaction andBrand Love in Generating Behavioral Intention" (2016). TTRA Canada 2016 Conference. 28.Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/ttracanada_2016_conference/28  Examining the Role of Satisfaction and Brand Love  in Generating Behavioral Intention   Ye (Sandy) Shen, Shuyue Huang, Hwan-Suk Chris Choi and Marion Joppe School of Hospitality, Food and Tourism Management, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada   Introduction Behavioral intention has attracted much attention from both the industry and academia (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1972; Baker & Crompton, 2000; Ryu & Han, 2010). As behavioral intention is equated with customers’ conative loyalty (Chen & Chen, 2010), investigating behavioral intention can give implications for tourism businesses on how to raise consumers’ loyalty and thus lead to profitable development. Behavioral intention includes two dimensions: intention to recommend and intention to revisit (Zeithaml, Berry & Parasuraman, 1996). The former refers to tourists’ favorable comments, which have been seen as an effective marketing approach in the service sector (George & Berry, 1981; Zeithaml, Berry & Parasuraman, 1993). The latter is defined as the possibility of a tourist participating in an activity or visiting a place again (Baker & Crompton, 2000).  Previous studies have intensively investigated the antecedents of behavioral intention (Williams & Soutar, 2009). Even though satisfaction was found to have a positive impact on behavioral intention, the effectiveness of this impact has been questioned by an increasing number of studies (Jones & Sasser, 1995; Jung & Joon, 2012; McKercher, Denizci-Guillet & Ng, 2012). Jones and Sasser (1995) suggested that merely satisfying customers is not enough to retain their loyalty since satisfied customers are free to switch to another brand. Therefore, researchers emphasize the importance of an emotional bond between customers and a brand (Shimp & Madden, 1988), and brand love has been considered as a strong positive antecedent of behavioral intention (Alnawas & Altarifi, 2016; Wallace, Buil & de Chernatony, 2014). Even though researchers have discussed brand love widely in marketing studies, brand love and its relationships with other constructs have not been investigated adequately in the tourism and hospitality context. Therefore, the research objectives are to investigate the relationships among perceived value, satisfaction, brand love, and behavioral intention in the restaurant context; and to explore whether satisfaction and brand love make different contributions in forming behavioral intention.   Conceptual framework Perceived value, satisfaction, and brand love A myriad of studies have demonstrated that perceived value is a crucial antecedent of satisfaction (Chen & Chen, 2010; Williams & Soutar, 2009). Customers are more likely to feel satisfied when they perceive high value in tourism services (Bojanic, 1996; Yoon, Lee & Lee, 2010). Additionally, perceived value plays an important role in forming brand love since it can lead to customers’ love for the firm (Long-Tolbert & Gammoh, 2012). Brand love, as an emotion, could also be developed through high levels of satisfaction (Carroll & Ahuvia, 2006). Therefore, this study proposed the following three hypotheses: H1: Perceived value positively influences satisfaction.  H2: Perceived value positively influences brand love. H3: Satisfaction positively influences brand love. Satisfaction, brand love, and future behavioral intention Researchers have put forward that higher levels of satisfaction can result in favorable future behavioral intention (Chen & Chen, 2010; Baker & Crompton, 2000). Since brand love can lead to the committed relationship between customers and a brand (Tsai, 2011), customers like to recommend and revisit the   places associated with their beloved brand (Carroll & Ahuvia, 2006). Therefore, the following hypotheses were proposed: H4: Satisfaction positively influences intention to recommend. H5: Satisfaction positively influences intention to revisit. H6: Brand love positively influences intention to recommend. H7: Brand love positively influences intention to revisit.   Figure 1. Conceptual framework  Method To test the seven hypotheses (Figure 1), this study collected 350 surveys from four cities in China, including Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Suzhou from November 2014 to March 2015. The on-site questionnaire surveys were conducted right after customers had meals in fine dining restaurants, such as Grandma's Home and Tasty. The respondents were asked to indicate their degree of agreement with each statement in the questionnaire according to a seven-point Likert scale: where 1=strongly disagree and 7=strongly agree. The measurement items for the three latent constructs (i.e. perceived value, satisfaction, and brand love) are shown in Table 1. Intention to recommend and intention to revisit are one-item constructs (Zeithaml et al., 1996): “I will recommend this restaurant brand to someone who seeks my advice” and “Next time I will dine out in this restaurant brand.” The final data set has 346 valid responses, and the demographic information of the respondents is shown in Table 2. Table 1. Measurement items of perceived value, satisfaction, and brand love Construct Measurement item Reference Perceived value  (4 items) The restaurant experience was excellent value for money. Harris and Goode (2004)  I am happy with the value for money I get from the restaurant experience. The restaurant services are excellent value. The restaurant food is excellent value. Satisfaction (6 items) I am completely satisfied with the restaurant service. He, Li and Harris (2012) I am very pleased with the restaurant service. I am absolutely delighted by their service. I am completely satisfied with this restaurant’s food. I am very pleased with this restaurant’s food. I am absolutely delighted by the food. Brand love (7 items) This is a wonderful brand. Carroll and Ahuvia (2006) This brand makes me feel good. This brand is totally awesome. I have no particular feelings about this brand. I love this brand! This brand is a pure delight. I am very passionate about this brand. Note: The items in the survey were first designed in English. These items were translated into Chinese and back-translated into English to ensure consistency.   Table 2. Demographic information of the sample (N=346) Characteristic Percentage (%) Characteristic Percentage (%) Gender  Income  Male 52.8 Less than 3000RMB 12.7 Female 47.2 3001-6000RMB 45.4 Age  6001-9000RMB 21.1 18-24 9.8 9001-12000RMB 12.1 25-34 53.8 More than 12001RMB 8.7 35-44 25.4 Education  45-54 10.7 High school or less 11.6 55 and above 0.3 College, including vocational school 26.9   University 48.7   Graduate school 12.8 The study followed the two-stage testing procedure recommended by Anderson and Gerbing (1988). First, confirmatory factor analysis was used to estimate the measurement scale. In this step, two items of brand love were excluded because of insufficient loadings (factor loading < 0.6). The remaining items showed satisfactory construct reliabilities, which are larger than the cut-off point 0.7 (Table 3). The average variance extracted value (AVE) of each construct is greater than 0.5, showing a good convergent validity. Additionally, as all the square roots of AVE are larger than any correlation in Table 4, discriminant validity has been achieved (Anderson & Gerbing, 1988). Second, this study tested the seven research hypotheses in SPSS 20.0 and AMOS 21.0.  Table 3. Scale reliability of perceived value, satisfaction, and brand love Construct and item Std. coefficient Construct reliability AVE Perceived value    The restaurant experience was excellent value for money. 0.825 0.917 0.735 I am happy with the value for money I get from the restaurant experience. 0.908   The restaurant services are excellent value. 0.859   The restaurant food is excellent value. 0.836   Satisfaction    I am completely satisfied with the restaurant service. 0.722 0.923 0.669 I am very pleased with the restaurant service. 0.776   I am absolutely delighted by their service. 0.743   I am completely satisfied with this restaurant’s food. 0.930   I am very pleased with this restaurant’s food. 0.902   I am absolutely delighted by the food. 0.811   Brand love    This is a wonderful brand. 0.848 0.864 0.566 This brand makes me feel good. 0.880   This brand is totally awesome. 0.762   I love this brand! 0.627   I am very passionate about this brand. 0.601   Table 4. Correlations between perceived value, satisfaction, and brand love  Perceived value Satisfaction Brand love Perceived value 1   Satisfaction 0.699 1  Brand love 0.706 0.731 1 Note: √𝐴𝑉𝐸𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑐𝑒𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑑 𝑣𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 = 0.857, √𝐴𝑉𝐸𝑠𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑠𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 = 0.818, and √𝐴𝑉𝐸𝑏𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 = 0.752   Results As shown in Table 5, the goodness-of-fit indices show that the proposed model has a good fit: GFI is 0.90, and CFI and IFI are all above 0.95 (Bentler, 1990); and RMSEA is smaller than 0.1 (Anderson & Gerbing, 1988). Additionally, all the tested paths are statistically significant at 0.001 level, and all the standardized coefficients are positive, indicating that all the paths are supported and the constructs have positive relationships (Figure 2). The results also demonstrate the different predictive powers of each construct. Perceived value explains 50.4% of the variance in satisfaction but only explains 20.4% of the variance in brand love. Additionally, satisfaction and brand love explain 13.2% and 13.9% of the variance in recommendation, respectively, suggesting that they have similar predictive powers to recommendation. However, brand love (25.7%) has much greater predictive power to revisit compared to satisfaction (9.3%).  Table 5. Results of the model and goodness-of-fit indices Hypotheses Std. coefficient t-value R2 H1: perceived value  satisfaction 0.710 11.328*** 0.504 H2: perceived value  brand love 0.452 6.807*** 0.204 H3: satisfaction  brand love 0.400 5.984*** 0.160 H4: satisfaction  recommendation 0.363 5.296*** 0.132 H5: satisfaction  revisit 0.305 4.871*** 0.093 H6: brand love  recommendation 0.373 7.890*** 0.139 H7: brand love  revisit 0.507 5.429*** 0.257 Note: *** p<0.001; 𝜒2= 335.068 (df = 104), 𝜒2/ df = 3.222, p<0.001; RMSEA= 0.080; GFI = 0.900; CFI = 0.956, IFI = 0.956.   Figure 2. Results of the path analysis Note: *** p<0.001  Conclusion and practical implication This study demonstrates the relationships among perceived value, satisfaction, brand love, intention to recommend, and intention to revisit. The most important contribution of this study is to find the different contributions of satisfaction and brand love in forming behavioral intention. The findings show that satisfaction and brand love have similar effects on intention to recommend. However, the effects of brand love on intention to revisit are much greater than that of satisfaction. The implications for tourism service providers are as follows: for those that heavily rely on word-of-mouth marketing, satisfying customers is crucial because satisfied customers are more likely to express favorable comments. For those who need to retain repeat customers, simply satisfying them is not enough. Therefore, strategies, such as establishing an outstanding brand image and providing customer-oriented services, should be implemented to build an emotional bond between customers and the brand. Additionally, this study confirmed that perceived value can be used as a predictor of satisfaction and brand love. No matter whether a service provider focuses on gaining more recommendations or retaining customers, letting customers feel high perceived value should be in the first priority.   References Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (1972). Attitudes and normative beliefs as factors influencing behavioral intentions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 21(1), 1-9. Alnawas, I., & Altarifi, S. (2016). Exploring the role of brand identification and brand love in generating higher levels of brand loyalty. Journal of Vacation Marketing, 22(2), 111-128. Anderson, J. C., & Gerbing, D. W. (1988). Structural equation modeling in practice: A review and recommended two-step approach. 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Examining the Role of Satisfaction and Brand Love in Generating Behavioral Intention

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Examining the Role of Satisfaction and Brand Love in Generating Behavioral Intention

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