Trust and Loyalty in Building the Brand Relationship with the Customer: Empirical Analysis in a Retail Chain in Northern Brazil

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript title “Trust and loyalty in building the Brand Relationship with the Customer: Empirical analysis in a retail chain in Northern Brazil” It’s a pleasure to give the feedback on your manuscript. To me, it’s well written and structured. However, a few observations are mentioned below to fix them for the next step.

· Try to avoid acronyms from the abstract.

· I have a significant concern about the Literature Review (LR) portion.

It should mix LR up with the old and new references. Nevertheless, there is a still powerful need have enhanced to add LR from years 2021, and 2022. A few suggestions are below but are not limited to add.

 https://doi.org/10.3390/su131910705

https://doi.org/10.1080/15332861.2021.1889818

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13126839

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/6647

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9425079

 

· What is the future perspective of this manuscript also please the recommendations?

·        During the review, I noticed that it does not cite some references in the text and also some papers cited in the text but the author(s) probably forgot to provide their references. Please recheck your entire references and citations. 

·       Further, the author(s) should check the grammatical and English errors. I suggest author(s) to proof editing to the entire manuscript, it will significantly help to improve the English language.

Author Response

 

The authors are grateful for the reviewers' comments and recommendations, having tried to reformulate the article in order to accommodate the suggestions presented.

So:

(1) The literature review was reviewed and reinforced with more recent studies on the object of study;

(2) Included in the final bibliography are the references (papers) that were included in the text, but which, for a mere mistake, were not indicated at the end

(3) English writing and grammatical errors were checked to improve the written quality of the document

(4) The article is structured in 5 parts (introduction, literature review, methodology, analysis of results and conclusion), and at the end of the data analysis and conclusion, the results are discussed.

(5) We reinforce the discussion, the contributions of the study, the limitations and present clues for future research works.

(6) Theoretical background was presented and the hypotheses were substantiated, based on the works identified in the literature review;

(7) The process of administration and collection of the questionnaires was better described;

(8) Discussion of results was reinforced;

(9) The academic and managerial contributions of the study were identified, as well as the limitations of the research;

(10) Guidelines for future investigations were presented

Best Regards and Thanks for all your work

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper represents a relevant contribution for investigating trust and loyalty in building the brand relationship with the customer, in terms of an empirical analysis in a retail chain in Northern Brazil. The identified problem research itself seems reasonable, and certainly opens an avenue for discussion. The introduction to the paper nicely suggests that there still are gaps in knowledge that can be filled with the type of research conducted in this study. However, in my opinion some further considerations are the following:

 

• The paper should be structured in 5 parts: Introduction, Theoretical Background, Methods, Findings, Discussion and Conclusions. 
• I suggest considering a general, integrative theoretical approach to present a conceptual framework previously, and then write the paper from the angle of the specific chosen approach.
• It would be very useful to add in the second part (that is, "Theoretical Background"), an additional subsection regarding the hypotheses of the research.
• Even though the paper is empirically oriented, good papers (either theoretical or empirical) always provide a review of both types of papers related to their topic of study. The reasons for this are that different types of readers may be interested in reading the paper and more importantly it helps to better evaluate the merits of the paper’s contribution.
• In the literature section, the information presented about different studies is unequal.
• The data subsection, discussions, and conclusion section are too brief, and the conclusions mentioned in the end of the article require more elaboration in previous sections. Particularly, a Conclusions and Implications Section regarding the ways in which this research with differing intervention contributes to managerial and theoretical implications in the study is required.
• To the end of the paper, I suggest including several subsections renaming this section as follows: Discussion and Conclusions (in addition, Limitations, and Implications must be included). The authors must answer the hypotheses to validate in this paper.
• The paper does not include sufficient information and explanations (argumentation) for the data collected. 
• Limitations of the study in terms of the generalization of the findings should be added.
• Certainly, results are more indicative rather than representative. Managerial contributions of the study in terms of the generalization of the findings should be extended. 

 

 

Author Response

 

The authors are grateful for the reviewers' comments and recommendations, having tried to reformulate the article in order to accommodate the suggestions presented.

So:

(1) The literature review was reviewed and reinforced with more recent studies on the object of study;

(2) Included in the final bibliography are the references (papers) that were included in the text, but which, for a mere mistake, were not indicated at the end

(3) English writing and grammatical errors were checked to improve the written quality of the document

(4) The article is structured in 5 parts (introduction, literature review, methodology, analysis of results and conclusion), and at the end of the data analysis and conclusion, the results are discussed.

(5) We reinforce the discussion, the contributions of the study, the limitations and present clues for future research works.

(6) Theoretical background was presented and the hypotheses were substantiated, based on the works identified in the literature review;

(7) The process of administration and collection of the questionnaires was better described;

(8) Discussion of results was reinforced;

(9) The academic and managerial contributions of the study were identified, as well as the limitations of the research;

(10) Guidelines for future investigations were presented

Best Regards and Thanks for all your work

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Greetings, now article looks better. 

Author Response

Greetings, now article looks better. 

R:| Dear Reviewer, thanks for your great job and enforces to give me ideas and good advice to improve the paper.

Many thanks for all your job in this paper review.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have made some improvements compared to the previous submission. In my opinion, there are some recommendations as follows:

 

·       In terms of explaining the paper contribution from a theoretical point of view, I am not completely satisfied. On the one hand, in section, 2, the problem description is described and presented, but it seems reasonable to move the model/conceptual framework to the end of this section, with a short introduction about the hypotheses, before Section 3. Methodology.

 

·       On the other hand, in section 5. Conclusion, it is also recommended to briefly present subsections and describe the findings, recommendations, and the main discussion, even for readers who are not familiar with the topic.

Author Response

The authors have made some improvements compared to the previous submission. In my opinion, there are some recommendations as follows:

• In terms of explaining the paper contribution from a theoretical point of view, I am not completely satisfied. On the one hand, in section, 2, the problem description is described and presented, but it seems reasonable to move the model/conceptual framework to the end of this section, with a short introduction about the hypotheses, before Section 3. Methodology.
• On the other hand, in section 5. Conclusion, it is also recommended to briefly present subsections and describe the findings, recommendations, and the main discussion, even for readers who are not familiar with the topic.

R:| 

Dear Reviewer, thanks for your great job and enforces to give me ideas and good advice to improve the paper.

We made several changes to the paper in several sections. Your calls for attention were very important to improve the article.

See please, the changes in red colour

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx