Win or Lose, Take Me Out to the Ball Game! An Empirical Investigation of Loyalty Proneness among College Students

This study compared participants’ brand-loyalty-proneness scores on six products: blue jeans, delivery pizza, tennis shoes, soft drinks, beer, and professional sports teams. The literature shows that marketers are faced with flagging consumer-brand loyalty for a variety of products. The study consisted of asking university students to complete an adaptation of the Loyalty Proneness scale (Lichtenstein, Netemeyer, & Burton, 1990; Raju, 1980 ), a unidi-mensional five-item instrument, tailored to fit the six products noted above. It was predicted that participants would exhibit greater brand loyalty to professional sports teams than to the other five products studied. To test two related hypotheses, the factor structure and internal reliability of the scale were empirically investigated, and brand-loyalty mean scores were compared. Results provided support for the hypothesis. Managerial implications and avenues of further research are discussed.