Brand loyalty in South Africa rests on trust that sport and CSR can support and deception can waste

Introduction

Marketers in South Africa talk about brand loyalty as though it were a single thing that can be bought with the right campaign. The evidence is messier than that. Most of the local studies come out of retail banking (Taoana, Quaye and Abratt, 2022; Van Deventer and Habtemichael Redda, 2023), a few look at online shopping (Makhitha and Ngobeni, 2021), and a smaller group looks at sport and corporate social responsibility (CSR) as routes to the consumer. When these are read side by side, the thing that keeps turning up is trust. Satisfaction feeds it, deception wrecks it, and sport and CSR only help when they are believed (Bisschoff and Els, 2023; Volschenk, Gerber and Santos, 2022; Motadi, 2024).

This paper argues that brand loyalty among South African consumers is held up mainly by satisfaction and trust, that consumer preferences are shaped by perceived risk as much as by the brand itself, and that sports marketing and CSR are supporting actors rather than loyalty engines (Moyo, Knott and Duffett, 2022; Motadi, 2024). It also argues that marketing ethics is not a side issue. Misleading claims draw down the same trust that loyalty depends on (Mupangavanhu and Kerchhoff, 2023). The paper looks first at what drives loyalty, then at how consumers weigh risk and peer opinion, then at sport and CSR, and finally at deception and the rules meant to limit it. One caution runs through the whole thing. None of the sources measures what happens to loyalty when household budgets are squeezed, so claims about economic pressure here stay tentative.

What the local evidence says drives loyalty

Retail banking is where South African loyalty research is thickest. Bisschoff and Els (2023) surveyed banking customers and got 150 usable questionnaires out of more than 1,000 sent, a 15% response rate (Bisschoff and Els, 2023). Their factor analysis pulled out four loyalty factors that together explained 55% of the variance. Customer service and satisfaction took 34% on its own, while negative publicity (7.5%), regulatory compliance and trust (7.1%) and trust and reputation (6.5%) trailed far behind. So satisfaction is the heavy lifter, but three of the four factors are really about whether the bank can be believed. The small sample and low response rate mean the percentages should be read as indicative, not precise (Bisschoff and Els, 2023; Taoana, Quaye and Abratt, 2022).

A study of Generation Y banking customers points the same way, with a twist. Van Deventer and Habtemichael Redda (2023) modelled responses from 271 young customers and found that satisfaction predicted loyalty very strongly (a path coefficient of 0.793), while service quality, which one might expect to matter a lot, did not reach statistical significance as a direct predictor (0.097, p = 0.175). Satisfaction also predicted trust (0.715), and commitment added to trust (0.257). That suggests service quality works through satisfaction instead of acting on loyalty directly, though a single cross-sectional survey of one age group cannot settle the causal order. Still, it fits the picture in Bisschoff and Els (2023) of a chain that runs from experience to satisfaction to trust.

Taoana, Quaye and Abratt (2022) looked at the same sector from a different angle. They tested four antecedents of loyalty among 351 retail banking customers, namely satisfaction, brand relationship quality, customer advocacy and brand trust, and they framed the work against a market where new banks were arriving and many customers were unhappy with their current provider. The abstract does not say which antecedent won, so that part stays open. What the design does show is that local researchers no longer treat loyalty as repeat purchase. They treat it as a relationship with some emotional and reputational content (Taoana, Quaye and Abratt, 2022; Van Deventer and Habtemichael Redda, 2023), which is a fair step forward from the older habit of counting how often someone buys.

There is an obvious weakness in all of this. Banking is a peculiar category. Loyal customers are defined partly by not switching and by holding more products (Bisschoff and Els, 2023), and a customer who stays may simply be stuck. When a respondent says they are loyal to their bank, it is hard to know how much of that is attachment and how much is inertia. The banking studies do not separate the two cleanly (Van Deventer and Habtemichael Redda, 2023), and that matters for the question of economic pressure, because a household under strain might stay put for lack of energy or choice while still being ready to leave at the first decent alternative. Loyalty measured by attitudes can look healthy right up to the moment people go (Taoana, Quaye and Abratt, 2022).

Consumer preferences are shaped by perceived risk and by peers

Brand choice does not happen in a vacuum, and a consumer’s preferences depend a good deal on what they fear might go wrong. Makhitha and Ngobeni (2021) surveyed 207 shoppers recruited at two malls in Gauteng and tested how perceived risk shapes attitude towards online shopping. Privacy risk showed the strongest link with attitude (a coefficient of 0.553), product risk came next (0.296), and delivery risk did not matter in their model. Attitude then predicted the intention to shop online very strongly (0.81). In plain terms, what seems to hold South African consumers back is not whether the parcel arrives but whether the seller can be trusted with their data and whether the product is what it claims to be (Makhitha and Ngobeni, 2021; Mupangavanhu and Kerchhoff, 2023).

That finding needs handling with care. The authors report a convenience sample from two Gauteng malls, three quarters of whom had already bought online, and their own tables and text disagree on some coefficients (Makhitha and Ngobeni, 2021). The direction of the privacy result is still plausible, and it lines up with the banking studies, which also put trust and reputation near the centre (Bisschoff and Els, 2023). A brand that looks risky on privacy or product honesty is going to have trouble getting loyalty in the first place (Makhitha and Ngobeni, 2021). So the preference for a particular brand is partly a preference for a lower chance of being burned.

Peer influence adds another layer. Pillay (2021) studied how adopting electronic word-of-mouth shapes brand love among Generation Z consumers, using 284 usable questionnaires from one South African city (Pillay, 2021). Argument quality drove perceived usefulness of a review (0.530), usefulness drove adoption (0.740), but adoption translated into brand love only weakly (0.270). Source credibility, which many marketers assume is the key, was reported as not supported. The upshot is that young consumers read reviews for good reasons and still do not fall in love with brands because of them. Online chatter can inform a preference without producing attachment, and attachment is what loyalty needs (Pillay, 2021; Taoana, Quaye and Abratt, 2022).

Putting these together, consumer preferences in South Africa look conditional. People lean towards brands that feel safe and fair (Van Deventer and Habtemichael Redda, 2023), they listen to peers when the argument holds up (Pillay, 2021), and they hold back when privacy or product claims look shaky (Makhitha and Ngobeni, 2021). This is all consistent with a trust-led account of loyalty, though the samples are small, urban and mostly young, so the picture of the wider population, including lower-income households outside the metros, remains thin.

Sport and CSR as supporting routes to loyalty

Sport is an attractive vehicle for South African marketers because it draws large, emotional audiences. Whether that attention turns into brand outcomes is another matter. Moyo, Knott and Duffett (2022) interviewed key personnel at six professional sport organisations across cricket, rugby and soccer to explore how CSR relates to marketing performance. Four themes came out of the interviews, namely marketing objectives, income and revenue growth, marketing share and CSR initiatives (Moyo, Knott and Duffett, 2022). The authors proposed criteria for judging CSR’s effect on marketing performance, among them tickets and sales, brand loyalty, brand perception, media coverage and sponsorship. That list is revealing. Brand loyalty appears as one outcome among several, and the study offers a way to look for it more than evidence that CSR produces it (Moyo, Knott and Duffett, 2022; Motadi, 2024).

The destination-branding work of Hemmonsbey and Tichaawa (2021) shows both the promise and the limits. They combined 24 stakeholder interviews with 403 questionnaires collected at the Comrades Marathon and the IRONMAN event in Port Elizabeth (Hemmonsbey and Tichaawa, 2021). Visitors came for the sport (81.5% said the event was their main reason), 51.6% extended their stay, and 54.1% said the event made them want to return. Those are real behavioural signals. Yet when visitors were asked who brands South Africa through events, they pointed to event organisers (33.5%) and government (32.7%), and only 18.0% pointed to sponsors. So a sponsor paying for visibility may get less credit than it assumes (Hemmonsbey and Tichaawa, 2021; Moyo, Knott and Duffett, 2022).

There is a mismatch here worth stating. Sport can draw people in and shape how a place is seen, but the credit lands on the organisers and the state rather than on the company with its logo on the shirt. For a firm hoping to convert sponsorship into loyalty, that is a warning. The Comrades and IRONMAN samples are also event visitors, 59.1% of them international, so they say little about the everyday South African fan whose loyalty a local brand wants to win (Hemmonsbey and Tichaawa, 2021). What the two studies share is the idea that sport works best when it is tied to something people already value, whether that is a community programme or a credible national story (Moyo, Knott and Duffett, 2022; Hemmonsbey and Tichaawa, 2021).

CSR beyond sport follows a similar pattern. Motadi (2024) reviewed about 50 sources and argued that CSR aimed at local problems such as education, health care and poverty builds loyalty better than generic giving, provided it looks authentic and transparent. The paper has no primary data, and its own methods section is not fully consistent with its introduction, so it works better as a pointer than as proof. Even so, its main claim sits comfortably beside the banking evidence. If trust is what loyalty runs on, then CSR helps when it adds to trust and does nothing, or harm, when it looks like decoration (Motadi, 2024; Bisschoff and Els, 2023).

Taken together, sport and CSR look like amplifiers. They can make a good brand more visible and more liked (Moyo, Knott and Duffett, 2022), and they give the brand something to point at that is not a price promotion (Motadi, 2024). They do not appear to replace the basics of satisfaction and honest dealing. A company that sponsors a team while its customer service leaves people unhappy is spending money on the wrong end of the chain, at least on the evidence the banking studies give (Bisschoff and Els, 2023; Van Deventer and Habtemichael Redda, 2023).

Deception and the limits of the rules

Marketing ethics matters commercially because trust is the asset that deception draws down. Volschenk, Gerber and Santos (2022) ran an experiment with 120 middle- to upper-income South African shoppers, using a fictitious washing powder (Volschenk, Gerber and Santos, 2022). Shoppers who saw a greenwashed advertisement and had no briefing on greenwashing reported a purchase intent of 3.93 and were willing to pay R37.79 per kilogram. Those who saw the same advertisement after learning about greenwashing scored 1.38 and R24.31. That gap of roughly 36% in willingness to pay is a penalty for being caught, and the informed group paid even less for the greenwashed product than for one making no claim at all (Volschenk, Gerber and Santos, 2022; Bisschoff and Els, 2023).

Two readings follow, and they pull in different directions. The first is encouraging for ethical firms, since informed consumers punish deceit and prefer silence to a false claim (Volschenk, Gerber and Santos, 2022). The second is uncomfortable. Shoppers who were not informed rewarded the false claim, and general environmental awareness did not help them spot it. So deception pays right up until it is exposed. That is a short-term incentive to cheat sitting next to a long-term cost, and it is exactly the structure in which trust-based loyalty gets eroded slowly and then quickly (Bisschoff and Els, 2023). The study uses one product, one mall sample and a single exposure, so it cannot show how long the penalty lasts (Volschenk, Gerber and Santos, 2022).

The regulatory side is patchy. Mupangavanhu and Kerchhoff (2023) examine how South African law deals with false and misleading online marketing, and they find a framework spread across the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002, the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 and the Advertising Regulatory Board’s Social Media Code. The Code requires influencers to disclose paid partnerships and prohibits deceptive content (Mupangavanhu and Kerchhoff, 2023). But the authors point out that the pieces overlap, that influencer marketing is poorly covered by legislation, and that self-regulation is hard to enforce against advertisers who are not members, since rulings do not bind them. Their preferred fix is a consolidated statute for online and offline consumers (Mupangavanhu and Kerchhoff, 2023).

Read alongside the experiment, the legal analysis suggests a gap. Consumers cannot reliably spot greenwashing on their own (Volschenk, Gerber and Santos, 2022), and the rules that should catch it are fragmented and partly voluntary (Mupangavanhu and Kerchhoff, 2023). That leaves a good deal of the work to firms themselves. A brand that wants loyalty will have to treat disclosure and honest claims as part of its own proposition, not as a compliance chore, because the formal system will not always do the policing. It also means that the argument for ethics in marketing here is a commercial one as much as a moral one, which is a point both studies support without quite stating it (Volschenk, Gerber and Santos, 2022; Mupangavanhu and Kerchhoff, 2023).

A final thread ties ethics back to the earlier sections. Bisschoff and Els (2023) found negative publicity to be its own loyalty factor, and Makhitha and Ngobeni (2021) found that privacy and product risk shape how consumers feel about buying online. Both are, in effect, ethics problems seen from the consumer’s side. A data misuse story or a misleading advertisement feeds both. Where sport sponsors and CSR programmes are involved, a scandal at the partner organisation or a hollow community gesture feeds them too, which is one reason authenticity keeps coming up in the CSR literature (Motadi, 2024).

Conclusion

The sources considered here point to a fairly consistent account. Brand loyalty among South African consumers rests on satisfaction and trust (Bisschoff and Els, 2023; Van Deventer and Habtemichael Redda, 2023), with service quality acting mostly through satisfaction, and consumer preferences are bent by perceived risk, especially around privacy and product honesty (Makhitha and Ngobeni, 2021). Sport and CSR can help, but the evidence suggests they work as amplifiers of a brand that is already trusted, and sponsors may not even get the credit (Hemmonsbey and Tichaawa, 2021; Moyo, Knott and Duffett, 2022). Deception is the mirror image. It pays in the short run when consumers are uninformed and costs heavily once they know, and South African regulation currently leaves much of the policing to the firms and to voluntary codes (Mupangavanhu and Kerchhoff, 2023; Volschenk, Gerber and Santos, 2022).

The evidence base is thinner than the confidence of much marketing talk would suggest. Banking dominates (Taoana, Quaye and Abratt, 2022), samples are small and urban, several studies rely on convenience sampling (Makhitha and Ngobeni, 2021; Pillay, 2021), and reporting problems appear in some of them. Above all, nothing here tests how loyalty behaves when incomes are under pressure, which is the situation many South African households are actually in. Future work could track the same consumers over time, compare lower-income and higher-income groups, and measure switching rather than stated attitudes. Until then, and with the caveat that Motadi (2024) offers only a literature review, the safest advice to a South African brand manager is a modest one: protect trust first, and treat sponsorship and CSR as ways of showing it, not as substitutes for earning it.

Reference list

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