“Customer value and customer brand engagement: Their effects on brand loyalty in automobile business”

The study investigates the extent to which customer value affected brand loyalty among mid-sized automobile customers in Thailand. It`s focused on assessing whether customer brand engagement acted as an intervening variable in the relationship between customer value and brand loyalty. A questionnaire was distributed to a random sample of 380 current users of medium-sized passenger automobiles in Thailand; these partici- pants were drawn from the list of automobile customers using a multistage sampling technique. The dealership customers were asked to complete an electronic survey us- ing their cell phones. Structural equation modeling was applied to prove the theoretical model. All the model fit indices revealed that the model was reasonably consistent with the data. Results validated customer brand engagement composed of three dimensions using confirmatory factor analysis and its role as a mediator. The findings also pro- vided novel insight into the interplay of the relevant variables and could be used as a guideline for managing automobile customers and promoting automobile marketing in the country.


INTRODUCTION
Marketing researchers have long been intrigued by the effect customers can have on product success. There are contributing factors that drive the commercial success of a product -customer value remains one of them and has been studied extensively in the past several decades (Chang & Weng, 2012;Lee et al., 2018;Woodruff, 1997). Nevertheless, while these studies have described and developed the construct of customer value, there is little empirical research on the automobile industry.
Thailand's automobile business has been one of the most vibrant sectors that has driven the growth of the country's economy in recent decades (Maikaew, 2019), considering Thailand is the biggest hub of automobile production for both domestic and foreign markets. Maikaew (2019) affirmed that Thailand's automobile industry employed about 850,000 people and contributed to 10% of the country's gross domestic product. The domestic sales hit a record of 1.43 million units sold with a growth rate of 12% a year. Nonetheless, the situation has been deteriorated since then. The automobile industry has experienced brand switching among current customers in recent years. The dealerships were uncertain about how to retain their customer base and generate repeat purchase in an appropriate timeframe in order to cover daily operating expenses. Besides the shrinking export volume, the domestic demand has reduced to 0.8 million units sold with the growth rate of 2%-3% since 2015 (Maikaew, 2019).
The traditional marketing approach is no longer effective in sustaining customer relationship in the automobile business. During the past decades, automobile manufacturers believed that product differentiation was the key to business success (Albert et al., 2008). Consequently, they attempted to create the best of product with distinctive features. Unfortunately, the consumers appreciated quality in products but failed to see any differences among brands (Yoo & Donthu, 2001). Only those who are inventive and original in contriving new ideas can survive in the market. Hence, all sectors in the market must rethink about the way they conduct marketing and probably must shift from brand satisfaction to customer brand engagement (CBE) to be in line with value-orientation trend. In other words, marketers must change their business perspectives from customer acquisition to customer retention.
To keep the best marketing efficiency in retaining customers, it may or may not be necessary to spend all available marketing budget on all existing customer values. The authors strongly believed that some customer values are more prominent than others because current customers themselves also prefer some values over others.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Customer value is considered an important strategic part used by companies to attract and retain customers (Rus, 2016). The customer value refers to the result of customer perception of product attributes or functionalities and is derived from reaching the customers' expectations when they use the product (Woodruff, 1997). To produce expected business outcomes, a company must be aware of the way various customer values affect consumers' brand choice.
Specifically, it was clear from numerous studies that customer value was one of the antecedent factors of CBE. Hollebeek and Chen (2014) proposed that customer value had an impact on CBE. Verma et al. (2016) indicated that customer value was positively related to CBE with social network rampage. Hapsari and Dean (2016) demonstrated that CBE was influenced by perceived customer value. Furthermore, Vargo and Lusch (2014) maintained that companies that created positive brand experiences for their engaged customers tended to improve perceived value.
In marketing, functional customer value is widely examined, whereas experiential customer value has been regarded as a factor affecting a customer's brand choice (Lee et al., 2018). Functional value was characterized as task-related, reasonable and related to information gathering (Babin et al., 1994). Experiential value refers to a subjective, personal, interactive feeling derived from fun and playfulness instead of from work completion. It was asserted that functional customer value did not drive brand equity toward purchase of a high-involvement product (Delgado-Ballester & Munuera-Alemán, 2005). Furthermore, Rus (2016) tested an interrelationship of perceived value, satisfaction, and loyalty among automobile owners. It was affirmed that functional customer value influenced satisfaction, but did not brand loyalty, whereas experiential value had an impact on both satisfaction and brand loyalty. Since functional and experiential customer value is indicated to influence satisfaction, Fernandes and Moreira (2019) proved that functional customer value drove satisfaction, while satisfaction and CBE were significantly related.
Social customer value is found to be more important, since nowadays consumers call upon businesses to be socially responsible. More companies have been adopting sustainable strategies and implementing more socially responsible practices. Patrick (2002) defined social value as the product's benefit/value to society. Lai et al. (2010) indicated that social customer value may be an antecedent to brand equity. Besides, Louro et al. (2001) stated that brand equity was created by an interaction between customers and a brand.
Besides a competition on actual product offering, companies further offer augment customer value through augmented products with add-on features and services that distinguish it from similar product offerings. The augmented product makes a brand outperform its competitors because the augmented value delivered gives the consumer a reason to buy through a cultivation of the customer-brand relationship. Lee et al. (2018) found that the relationship has a major impact on CBE.
Previous research (e.g., Chang Sweeney & Soutar, 2001) asserted that functional consumer value, experiential consumer value, and social customer value had an impact on purchase-related attitude and/or behavior. All existing automobile manufacturers have offered these customer value through ranges of products, services, social contribution activities. However, the competition becomes much intense where some brands further shift from the delivery of conventional customer value (which includes functional, experiential, and social value) to augmented customer value in which customers are offered with various customer privilege programs.
CBE concerns a consumer's activities in relation to cognition, emotion, and behavior, and an individual's interactions with a product or service brand . CBE has been a crucial element for a company in forging a relationship between its consumers (Dessart et al., 2016). Unlike most conventional concepts such as service quality or product satisfaction, CBE can predict brand loyalty more accurately because it can delve into the consumer-brand relationship (Hollebeek, 2011). Thus, CBE is indispensable to developing a strong brand , and a firm can instill in its customers a sense of loyalty to its brand (Kandampully et al., 2015). However, only a few exploratory studies have investigated this relationship (e.g., Dwivedi, 2015;So et al., 2016).
CBE is a context-specific, situation-dependent psychological state characterized by cognition, emotion and conation (Brodie et al., 2011). It was noted that CBE took a major role in the process of an exchange between a brand and customers. Moreover, CBE reflects customer motive with different levels of intensity and valence (Brodie et al., 2011), because of a customer's interaction with the company's offering, a company, or a brand at the physical or emotional level (Hollebeek, 2011). So et al. (2012) argued that CBE was determined by customer involvement, interactivity, customer rapport, brand trust, brand attachment, brand commitment, and brand performance while it influenced variables such as co-creation, customer satisfaction, brand experience, customer trust, brand commitment, brand loyalty, customer value, customer equity, brand reputation, brand recognition, and financial outcomes.
However, in contrast to So et al. (2012), Hollebeek and Chen (2014) conceptualized CBE as a process represented by a more inclusive conceptual framework, which depicted how CBE functioned. It was demonstrated that among the factors affecting CBE there were perceived brand and company actions, perceived brand quality and performance, perceived brand value, perceived brand innovativeness, delivery of brand promise, perceived brand, and company responsiveness. They argued that CBE contributed to attitude toward a brand and word-of-mouth dissemination.
Brand loyalty concerns a customer's strong determination to adhere to a particular brand over a long period of time and not being influenced by any factor that might result in brand switching (Oliver, 1999). It is not only the essence of brand equity (Keller, 2001), but also a leverage of competitiveness that helps a company establish an enduring tie with customers (Hwang & Kandampully, 2012).
Factors such as perceived quality attributes, costs incurred by switching brands, and satisfaction with a brand are important to loyalty to a particular brand (Bowden, 2009;Kandampully et al., 2015). However, it was maintained that this viewpoint had a psychological perspective (Delgado-Ballester & Munuera-Alemán, 2005), and failed to view from a cognitive perspective that engaged decision making; neither was it considered from a sociological standpoint toward brand loyalty. Given that today's consumers take the role of a co-owner or co-creator of a brand (Gong, 2018), branding is oriented toward relationship building and maintaining (Delgado-Ballester & Munuera-Alemán, 2005). This focus promotes the customer-brand relationship in marketing these days.
Brand loyalty has taken a new paradigm that incorporates novel constructs such as brand trust (Huang & Guo, 2021

AIMS AND HYPOTHESES
This study is aimed at investigating the interplay of customer value, CBE, and brand loyalty among the customers of medium-sized automobile brands in Thailand. Specifically, the study is aimed at ascertaining how well do customer value and CBE predict brand loyalty, and how much variance in brand value can be explained by scores on customer value and CBE. The second purpose is to determine the degree to which functional, experiential, social, and augmented customer value affects CBE. Thirdly, the study assesses which customer value drives the current customers of the medium-sized automobile to engage with a brand. Therefore, to address these objectives more clearly, the following hypotheses were formulated: H1: Customer value has an impact on the degree to which automobile customers are loyal to their selected brand.
H2: Customer value has an impact on CBE.
H3: CBE has an impact on the degree to which automobile customers are loyal to their selected brand.
H4: CBE mediates the relationship of customer value to brand loyalty.

Participants
The study was targeted at the current owners of medium-sized passenger automobiles priced at over US$32,900. In Thailand, this category of motor vehicles, commonly referred to as the D segment, is manufactured with four seats and primarily for use in the transportation of passengers. Among those offered in the market are Toyota Camry, Honda Accord, and Nissan Teana.
The sample was represented by the customers who at the time purchased a D-segment automobile.
Multistage sampling method was applied in such a way that the sample of automobile customers was randomly drawn from a stratified random sample of dealerships around the country. The list of dealership customers was provided by the Automobile Dealership Association of Thailand.

Measure
All the scales used were developed on the basis of previous studies, extensive literature review and discussion with marketing professionals in the automobile business in Thailand. The content validity in relation to clarity, appropriateness and readability of the items was checked by seeking consultation with five experts in the field of automobile marketing. Furthermore, a panel of experts, namely a college student, a high school teacher and a marketing manager were asked to evaluate the readability of the scales. Five items were suggested to be reworded for clarification.
Eventually a pool of 38 items was selected for the initial item pool. The items were structured as a declarative sentence and in a Likert-type format. Then, the scales were administered to a pilot sample of customers from some dealerships. This step was recommended by Bradburn et al. (2007) to reduce content ambiguity before review by the content experts.
The questionnaire was translated into Thai by two Thai language specialists. Some discrepancies in terms of wording and sentence structure were detected between the two versions, thoroughly discussed and resolved until a new version was agreed upon. Thereafter, this version was back-translated into English by a bilingual scholar. Next, help was sought from a marketing academic who was a native speaker of English in comparing the back-translated version and the original version item by item along with the questionnaire instruction to assess their semantic equivalence. Some slight discrepancies were found and were re- The contents of each scale are displayed in Table 2.
In responding to them, participants were required to identify their degree of agreement to each statement on a summated scale of 1 (= strongly disagree) to 5 (= strongly agree).

RESULTS
Before starting the SEM analysis, zero-order correlations across each of the scaled measures were assessed. As portrayed in Table 1, the mean of the items was examined. Items were omitted if their means were extreme (over 5 or less than 1) or if the item-total correlation was below .2 or if their omission caused alpha to increase (Meir & Gati, 1981 Note. All coefficients are significant at p < .05. Diagonals are the square root of AVE of each variable. FV = functional consumer value; EV = experiential consumer value; SV = social consumer value; AV = augmented consumer value; CC = cognitive customer brand engagement; AC = affective customer brand engagement; BC = behavioral customer brand engagement; BL = brand loyalty; α = internal consistency reliability; CR = construct reliability; AVE = average variance extracted. level (Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994;Schumacker & Lomax, 2015).
Discriminant validity was proven to hold because the AVE of each of the latent constructs was higher than the highest squared correlation with any of the other latent variables (Fornell & Larcker, 1981) (see Table 1). Moreover, the correlation between the constructs was within two standard errors (SE = 0.02, p < .001), confirming discriminant validity between the constructs (Anderson & Gerbing, 1988). Moreover, no pairwise correlation exceeded .85 (Bagozzi & Yi, 1988).
Not only were the average variances extracted well above . 50 (Fornell & Lacker, 1981;Hair et al., 2018), but the standardized factor loadings for each item of each construct were also greater than .5, and the composite reliability values were greater than .70 (Hair et al., 2018). As such, these estimates provided evidence of convergent validity.
A chi-square test was performed to test whether the model whose correlation is fixed at one is different from that whose correlation is not fixed at one (Anderson & Gerbing, 1988).
After examining the properties of the scales underlying the first-order model, factor analysis was conducted to evaluate the second-order model for customer value and CBE. The customer value construct had four dimensions. The overall index score has a standardized Cronbach's alpha of .80. As shown in Table 2, the second-order standard-ized factor loadings were higher than .67 and significant (p < .05).
The CBE construct had four dimensions. The most important dimension was the augmented customer value (. To assess model fit for the structural model, the standards recommended by Hu and Bentler in 1999 (CFI ≥ .80, AGFI ≥ .80, and RMSEA ≤ .08) were consulted and used as a benchmark. The results of the structural modeling analysis demonstrated the model provided acceptable fit to the data, χ 2 = 891.647, df =116, p < .001; CFI = .89; GFI = .72; AGFI = .70; RMSEA = .08.
In conclusion, according to the results from SEM, all the fit indices indicated that the model demonstrated goodness of fit to the data. The predictors were able to account for 35% of the variance in CBE. Experiential and augmented customer value influenced CBE; however, functional and social customer value did not influence CBE. The automobile has high performance. .68 The automobile has a long life. .76 The automobile has a reasonable price. .72 The automobile comes with proper warranty. .74 The automobile has superior quality. .69
.71 The brand's advertisement is true. .71 The brand is widely accepted and trusted. .82 The brand is modern and stylish. .68

Construct: Social customer value (Delgado-Ballester & Sabiote, 2015; Wang & Lin, 2010)
The brand has social responsibility in doing business. .70 The product is eco-friendly. .71 The shop is eco-friendly.
.71 The staff have environmental consciousness.
.82 The brand relates to eco-friendly activity. .68
.70 The brand provides a free invitation to dining or workshop. .71 The brand provides a discount to current customers for buying a new car. .71 The brand provides a discount for maintenance and repairs.
.82 The brand provides fast lane service to current customers for using after-sales service.
.67 The brand provides customers gifts on special occasions like birthday.
. This brand makes me believe in my ability.
.70 I feel proud upon using this brand. .71 I am fond of this specific brand.
.71 Associating with this brand makes me happy.
.82 I feel enthusiastic about this brand. .68

Construct: Behavioral customer brand engagement (Hollebeek et al. 2014; Dwivedi, 2015)
It takes me time researching this brand.
.70 I often choose this brand over the others in the product category. .71 Within the same product category, I always use this brand.
.71 I have sufficient information about this brand. .82
.70 I will purchase this brand again in the future.
.71 I will not buy a different brand if it is available in the store. .71 I am loyal to this brand. .82 Note. Factor loadings are significant. λ = factor loading.

DISCUSSION
The study complemented the existing body of knowledge on brand marketing by empirically validating some new concepts that have gained attention from academics and practitioners. Much has been discovered; however, there still are some unknowns, especially the interplay of CBE, customer value and brand loyalty. Though extensively investigated, they are not sufficiently supported by robust evidence.
The study improved the comprehension of the mediating role CBE assumed on the impact of customer value on the degree to which automobile customers were loyal to their selected brand. CBE proved to be a good predictor of brand loyalty, so did customer value. CBE also mediated the relationship of customer value and brand loyalty in the automobile customer. Customer value had both direct and intervening effects on brand loyalty. Customers' tendency to repurchase an automobile from a particular manufacturer was a function of customer value.
The impact of consumer-brand relationships was substantiated by the results. These findings were not congruent with Rus (2016) who maintained that functional customer value could drive customer satisfaction but not brand loyalty. Besides, it was found to be consistent with Lee et al. (2018) who asserted that experiential customer value could affect to a large extent customer's brand choice for the future purchase.
Even though the results were contrary to Louro and Cunha (2001) and Lai et al. (2010), social customer value requires an extended interval coupled with accumulated interactive experience between brand and customers to form brand equity. Another observation was that the social contribution or social marketing activities used to deliver social customer value were company-centric, not customer-centric. As a result, the consumers felt less relevant to them. This study suggests marketers maximize marketing efficiency to keep current customers loyal to the brand. Customer relationship can be established and maintained by utilizing both experiential and augmented consumer value. Specifically, marketers must heed customer needs and ensure that the company's brand is always on the top of their mind. Moreover, a brand must demonstrate to the customers that they are honest and genuine, as well as trustworthy. Besides, the look and feel of the brand must be always modern and stylish so that the customers want to relate to.
Since this study investigated the repurchase of the customers of automobiles, the findings may be generalizable to other product categories. Past research (e.g., Lee et al., 2018) did not directly investigate an antecedent such as augmented consumer value, but the consequence of the augmented customer value or relationship. Future research may attempt to examine other high-involvement products. However, those customer value may influence repurchase intention. It is suggested that future research will test the mediating role of CBE, and repurchase intention as a dependent variable.

CONCLUSION
Automobile business is crucial to the Thai economy, as evidenced by prevalent production plants and sale operations that were established in the country several decades ago and still are thriving nowadays. Moreover, even though there are diverse modes of public transport in Thailand, domestic transport still largely depends on private automobile use. Additionally, they even manufacture and import automobile parts as a major source of gross domestic income.
This study demonstrated that customer value was a vital tool necessary for automobile businesses in maintaining a relationship with their customers. The study results strongly suggest that customer brand engagement, particularly, customer-oriented programs such as customer privilege recognition, fast track after-sale service for customers, and other similar customer relationship management techniques, had a measurable impact on brand loyalty. Significant differences were found in the increase of brand loyalty upon enhanced efforts on customer value.
Overall, the study contributes to extending the conventional marketing philosophy in that marketers must develop customer relationship programs to provide augmented benefits to meet or even exceed the expectations of their current customers.