Jin-Long Lu

Purpose: This study investigates air passengers’ perceptions of the brand personalities of airlines and explores the relationships between the brand personality and its antecedent factor, the country-of-origin of the airlines, and the consequent factor which is the purchase intentions to the corresponding airlines.Design/methodology/approach: The study uses a questionnaire survey containing air passengers’ trip characteristics and demographics and three main scales: country-of-origin, brand personality, and purchase intentions to collect the data of 490 respondents flying from Kaohsiung to Macao. The passengers are from three types of airlines: an international airline with a global network, a regional airline, and a low-cost carrier. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to investigate the differences in the perceptions of brand personalities of airlines and several models were developed to determine the antecedent and the consequent factors of airline brand personality.Findings: The air passengers’ perceptions regarding the brand personalities of different types of airlines were significantly different. The country-of-origin of airlines was proved as a significant factor for the brand personality. The brand personality also significantly influenced passengers’ loyalty to the corresponding airlines. Moreover, some demographic and trip characteristics such as personal monthly income, memberships in the airline’s frequent flyer program, and experiences with the airlines were also determined as the significant variables to impact passengers’ loyalties.Originality/value: The concept of brand personality has been explored by various researches but few related to airline management and identified as a key element to brand marketing. Particularly, low-cost carriers always implement different marketing strategies to create a distinctive position in their target customers’ mind and legacy airlines are also doing different things to retain their customers. Therefore, investigating passengers’ perceptions of airlines from the perspective of brand personality is also an important issue for airline management. Not only does this study prove the differences in passengers’ cognitions of brand personalities of a global network airline, a regional network airline, and a low-cost airline but conclude the determinants and influences of the brand personality.

This study investigates the customer perceived value seen by Taiwanese passengers who flew between Taipei and Singapore regarding full service airlines and low-cost carriers. We collected a sample of passenger survey data at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport. Five constructs, forming into customer perceived value, namely, nonmonetary cost, perception of monetary cost, reputation, service quality, and service contact are identified based on the results of factor analysis. A regression model is then adopted to measure the relationships between customer perceived value and potential determinants. Passengers from traditional airlines determined their perceived value based mostly on what they gained from the airlines. Nevertheless, passengers formed their perceived value for the low-cost carrier, Jetstar in this study, according to the trade-off between what they gave, especially the nonmonetary cost, and what they received.