The Ebb and Flow of Brand Loyalty: A 28-Year Bibliometric and Content Analysis

TL;DR

This study provides a comprehensive bibliometric and content analysis of 28 years of brand loyalty research, identifying key trends, influential authors, and future directions in the field.

Contribution

It offers a novel bibliometric overview combined with qualitative insights to reveal emerging trends and gaps in brand loyalty research over nearly three decades.

Findings

Highly cited articles focus on brand love and social networks

The U.S. leads in research output on brand loyalty

Social networks and brand experiences are current research hotspots

Abstract

Business research is facing the challenge of scattered knowledge, particularly in the realm of brand loyalty (BL). Although literature reviews on BL exist, they predominantly concentrate on the pre-sent state, neglecting future trends. Therefore, a comprehensive review is imperative to ascertain emerging trends in BL This study employs a bibliometric approach, analyzing 1,468 papers from the Scopus database. Various tools including R software, VOS viewer software, and Publish or Perish are utilized. The aim is to portray the knowledge map, explore the publication years, identify the top authors and their co-occurrence, reliable documents, institutions, subjects, research hotspots, and pioneering countries and universities in the study of BL. The qualitative section of this research identifies gaps and emerging trends in BL through Word Cloud charts, word growth analysis, and a review of highly cited articles from the past four years. Results showed that highly cited articles mention topics such as brand love, consumer-brand identification, and social networks and the U.S. had the most productions in this field. Besides, most citations were related to Keller with 1,173 citations. Furthermore, in the qualitative section, social networks and brand experiences were found to be of interest to researchers in the field. Finally, by introducing the antecedents and consequences of BL, the gaps and emerging trends in BL were identified, so as to present the di-rection of future research in this area.