The effects of commitment and trust on the relationship between service quality and university brand loyalty in time of crisis

Existing literature on university brand loyalty (UBL) has less focused on a marketing-oriented perspective, or relationship marketing, and its impact on testing UBL. The aim of this study is to identity the roles and impacts of trust and commitment, which are main factors that create a relationship, in the relationship between university service quality, student satisfaction (SAT), and UBL and discuss its implications for university approaches of the marketing-oriented perspective. A self-report study was conducted with a total sample of 301 undergraduate students from four universities in the USA. PLS-SEM and path analysis were employed to test each hypothetical relationship. This study identified that trust and commitment play important roles as mediators in the relationship between SAT and UBL. Therefore, the findings support contributions of this study by offering implications that universities need to focus on building and maintaining the quality of relationship with students.