This research intends to examine the impacts of the marketing communication by an airline company on brand evidence and the relationship among brand evidence, reliability and customer satisfaction, thereby making implications for domestic large-scale airline companies to establish marketing strategies that help them obtain competitive advantage over others in the airline industry. The brief results of the empirical analysis are as follows.
First, the result of the analysis on the impact of the airline's marketing communication on the brand name, price/economic values, employees' service quality, and service scape, which are the four components of the brand evidence, showed that all factors had beneficial positive influences.
Second, the effect of price/economic values, employees' service quality and the service scape among the brand evidence on reliability was positive, while the brand name were not statistically significant.
Third, in terms of the impact relationship between brand evidence and customer satisfaction, the impact of price/economic values, employees' service quality, and service scape on customer satisfaction was positive. However, the brand name was not statistically significant.
Lastly, for the effect relationship between reliability and customer satisfaction, the impact of reliability on customer satisfaction was positive.
Based on the results of this research, several indications were drawn as follows.
First, the marketing communication activities of airline companies play a crucial role in increasing brand awareness. Therefore, if an airline company formalizes the four components as prominent for its marketing communication activities and expose them to customers, it will further add to the marketing effect. It is suggested that increasing efforts need to be made to get closer to customers by means of diverse types of marketing communication.
Second, customers are expecting reasonable services for the money they pay. How the benefit and services given to customers meet up to their expectations will become the evaluation of the customers about the airline they use, which leads to the company reliability. Accordingly, the companies need to provide convenience and give confidence to customers by making constant investments in services that can fulfill such expectations of the customers and reasonable pricing, purchase of advanced airplanes, and improvement of physical service quality, and thus establishing a foundation to gain competitive advantages in the airline industry.
Third, the airline companies need to give reliability to customers by making more efforts in such as provision of constant service training for employees to understand and provide services customers need, provision of employee education for better task-related knowledge so as to respond promptly to customer requests. Also, more investment in quality human resources need to be made through recruiting men of quality in the hiring process. In addition, creating a pleasant and safe service scape is a precondition.
In conclusion, these indications awaken us of the importance of marketing communication and brand evidence for service enterprises, such as an airline company, to found a right brand name position.
This study has a few limitations in spite of those indications. First, the subjects of this study were targeted on customers in the region of Daegu who have ever used large airliners, using a convenience sampling method. Therefore, it may be difficult to generalize the result of this study, and further data collection needs to be made targeting customers in diverse regions in the future research. Second, further research of a comparison research on marketing communication and brand evidence between large-scale airlines and low-cost ones will help suggest marketing strategies for gaining competitive advantages in the airline industry. Third, this study was done considering the marketing communication as one of the variables. If more detailed studies with sub-variables of the marketing communication are carried out for conducting various and broad research works, they will provide more diverse and specific indications to us.