Understanding service quality and reputation effects on purchase behavior through image: the moderating roles of service reliability

Abstract

Measuring the customers’ perspective with airlines’ service quality and their purchases is meaningful for academic researchers, practical management, and increasingly competitive environment. The sampling of 630 passengers jointly used structural equation modeling and the regression method to examine the proposed hypothesis. The results showed that airlines’ brand images for corporate and service reliability independently and jointly influence purchase behavior. The study has three important findings for the air-transport and airline-management literature. First, in contrast to the portrait of service quality influences, we find that when customers perceive the service quality and corporate reputation of airline provided, it will influence their evaluation of brand image, which affects their purchase intention. Next, we found that perceived value may influence repurchase intention through word of mouth (WOM). Finally, the concepts of mediation–moderation were introduced; these concepts have seldom been either examined or tested in previous studies.