How Personality and Experience Influence Customer Values and Loyalty: Evidence from Iranian Young Consumers

This study examines a theory-informed contextual extension of established brand-prestige models by testing the associations between brand experience and brand personality, on the one hand, and brand prestige, on the other, and the subsequent associations of brand prestige with four dimensions of perceived value (functional, hedonic, social, and financial) and with two forms of brand loyalty (attitudinal and behavioral). The study is situated in the Iranian luxury smartphone market and focuses on young adult consumers, a context and population in which prior model configurations have not been systematically tested. The conceptual model was developed by extending the brand-prestige frameworks of Choi et al. (2017) and S. Kim et al. (2019) to a developing-country, young-adult, luxury-smartphone setting. Data were collected from 916 respondents through a questionnaire using a mall-intercept convenience sampling approach. The measurement and structural models were estimated using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling with maximum likelihood estimation. The results indicate that brand experience and brand personality are positively associated with brand prestige. Brand prestige, in turn, is positively associated with all four dimensions of perceived value (functional, hedonic, social, and financial). However, the paths from social value and hedonic value to behavioral loyalty were not supported. The findings contribute to the branding literature by specifying the boundary conditions under which established brand-prestige models hold in a developing-country, young-adult, luxury-smartphone context, and by identifying which perceived-value dimensions are associated with attitudinal versus behavioral loyalty in this setting. The study also clarifies that the cross-sectional, non-experimental design supports model-based associations rather than causal claims, and it outlines the theoretical and managerial implications of these context-specific findings.