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A Brand Loyalty Concept: Comments on a Comment

Tarpey's [11] appraisal of the Jacoby and Kyner article, "Brand Loyalty Versus Repeat Purchasing Behavior" [5], contains much that we can agree with. However, several issues in his critique, we believe, deserve comment and are addressed here in the order in which they were raised. In his very first paragraph, Tarpey writes: "The research in the article does not warrant . . . the authors' conclusion that they have developed a definition of brand loyalty which is an improvement on the many other definitions to be found in the literature" [11, p. 214].' We address the "improvement" issue more directly below and simply wish to note here that our belief that the definiton possessed value was arrived at independent of the empirical research conducted and described in our article. As noted early in that article, "definitions are arbitrary and only good to the extent that they are useful. .... In that it illustrates problems that are inherent in the strictly operational definitions, clarifies certain aspects of the phenomenon, and suggests certain measurement guidelines, the definition already demonstrates some degree of utility" [11, p. 3]. The basic definition, which had been presented in two earlier articles [3, 6], has already influenced the thinking underlying the definition of brand loyalty found in Engel, Kollat, and Blackwell [2, pp. 550-2] and, according to Sheth,2 "substantially" influenced the Sheth and Park [10] formulation. These developments suggest our definition does indeed possess value and confirms our earlier contention that "a conceptual definition of brand loyalty has been presented which, at very least, is heuristic" [5, p. 8].