RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP VISION DEVELOPMENT AND ETHICS

Service quality and brand personality in hotel and hospitality the case of Romanian hotels 181
than 0.90 (actual value is 0.911), RFI (Relativ Fit index), NFI (Normed Fit index), IFI (Incremental
Fit index) and CFI (Comparative Fit index), all of them should be greater than 0.90.
All values are greater than or very close to 0.90: TLI (0.956), RFI (0.897), NFI (0.911), IFI
(0.962) and CFI (0.962).
Concluding the data analysis section, we can say that the model fit is a good one and that
the obtained results are in agreement with the theory.
Conclusions
Hotel chain entrepreneurs can manage brand loyalty through a better understanding of perceived
quality and brand personality. This paper tries to bridge a gap in the literature by investigating
the mediating effect of brand personality and service quality on brand value and loyalty
in the Romanian hospitality context.
We have tried to identify the relationship between service quality, brand personality and
brand value and brand loyalty. The four factors that were identified are: service quality,
employee quality, brand personality and brand value and brand loyalty. Perceived service quality
can be split into two different and heterogeneous constructs: service quality (referred to
as technical quality) and employee quality (referred to as the human capital abilities).
The result of the structural equation modeling revealed that indeed service quality does
positively and significantly influence or drive brand value and brand loyalty. There was no
finding such as employee quality influences brand value and brand loyalty, since the significance
level could not be accepted as relevant. As Correia Loureiro et al. (2014) noticed, perceived
service quality is split into physical quality and staff quality or employee quality, as
proposed by our study (the first two identified factors by our EFA).
Brand personality does positively and significantly influence brand value and brand loyalty.
Thus, marketing managers in the hotel industry should carefully assess service quality
and pay attention to evaluating brand personality, since these two elements are driving the
value of a hotel brand and they also enhance the loyalty towards a certain hotel brand. This
result also gives an insight into how important service quality is, and that the focus should
not be into improving employee quality, but into enhancing the service per se. This does not
mean that employee quality should be totally neglected, but only that it does not influence
brand value and brand loyalty as much as it would have otherwise been expected.
As predicted by theory, perceived service quality and brand personality both contribute
to the creation of brand value and brand loyalty (Aaker, 1997).
The final model is exemplified in the following diagram with the specification that the
first hypothesis is that service quality positively and significantly influences brand value and
loyalty and the second hypothesis that brand personality influences brand value and loyalty
in a positive and significant way.