The airline industry has facilitated access to the air transportation market, with open sky agreement which guarantees a broader autonomy due to price deregulation and autonomous decision of supply. Open Sky Policy of leading U.S. and Europe made the competition between airlines even more intense.
With the emergence of budget airline in 2005, the domestic airline market 8-domestic airline flights in the domestic airline market in 2017 starting to emerge a low-cost airline in 2005. The 89 airlines including foreign airlines are also in service in Incheon International Airport. For this reason, the competition of airline is getting more and more fierce.
Companies are strengthening their marketing communications activities to build effective relationships with their customers to gain competitive advantage and maximize profit for the company.
Brand evidence is a collection of service branding that customer experiences before or during purchase as a part of service branding. The customer tends to want a wide range of powerful brand evidence. They first consider the airline name or perceived price before selecting an airline. While using the aircraft, they recognize the brand of the airline as an employee''s service, service landscape, and core service.
After the trip, customers evaluate the experience and self-consistency of airline services. Thus, research on brand evidence in the aviation industry can help to understand clients what elements of an airline are leading to customer satisfaction. Based on this, we believe that we are able to gain a competitive advantage through understanding customers in the aviation market.
We want to help airline’s marketing strategy in the future by so distinguishing effect of marketing communication on brand evidence as well as brand evidence on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, with the moderating role of alternative attractiveness, and demographic differences.
Firstly we sampled the passengers waiting to board at Sacheon airport, in order to verify the research model and hypothesis derived from the review of previous studies. Secondly samples were drawn from employees who have experience in air travel or business trips among our employees through the acquaintances who work in the HR(human resource) department of enterprises in the Gyeongnam area, thirdly students who experienced recent air travel were selected as a sample in Jinju area. Fourthly, the survey was given to a sample of public.
The questionnaire consisted of a self-filling questionnaire that the respondents filled in the questionnaire after explaining the study purpose. The survey period lasted about 40 days from April 25 to June 5, 2017. Of the total 310 questionnaires surveyed, 286 were considered to be reliable and thus used in analysis. A five-point likert scale was used for survey, data from the survey were processed through the descriptive analysis, the reliability analysis, and factor analysis in accordance with SPSS 19.0 Program. Also, correlation analysis was conducted to check the degree of discriminant validity among the factors. The AMOS 18.0 program was then processed through confirmatory factor analysis to verify reliability and validity, and also handled to investigate hypothesis and control effect, path analysis, alternative attractiveness control effect analysis, and multiple group analysis.
First, advertisements as sub-factor of airline`s marketing communication has positive(+) effect on brand name, core services, and employee services of brand evidence, however, it do not affect perceived price. Word of Mouth was found to have all positive(+) effects on brand name, perceived price, core service and employee service.
Second, perceived price, core services, and employee services as a sub-factor of brand evidence have positive(+) effect on s customer satisfaction, on the other hand brand name does not have a positive(+) effect on customer satisfaction. It can be seen that perceived price, core service, and employee service are important factors in customer satisfaction. We have proved that competitive air-pricing policy, air transportation as airline`s core service, and authentic as well as kind employee service are important factors for customer satisfaction.
Third, customer satisfaction has significantly positive(+) effect on customer loyalty. In order to increase brand loyalty, the company''s efforts to impress customers should be given priority over customer satisfaction. As a result of analysis regarding analysis of path difference between groups alterative attractiveness as moderating variable, the higher attractiveness alternative of group satisfies, the higher core service does. The lower alternative attractiveness of group, the lower core service does. It is considered owing to the demographic characteristics that there are too many the 20s who have less experience of boarding. It is believed that the group with low alternative attractiveness , who have a high degree of satisfaction with the brand name, have high brand loyalty.