Bhardwaj, Agarwal, & Chuauan (2023)…

An undergraduate marketing student cited this study in an assignment relating to brand awareness. The Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovated Research reports itself as an open access, peer-reviewed, refereed journal and charges authors $55 USD to publish. Honestly, that’s a lot cheaper than some.

I reviewed the study and couldn’t believe the poor quality of the research and data analysis. Just a few points that popped out at me:

• The purpose of the study was to “examine the connection between consumer brand recognition, brand satisfaction, brand commitment, and brand loyalty” (emphasis added). However, upon further exploration, the authors only measured two dimensions: brand awareness and repeat purchases.
• The authors report that they used a questionnaire, but they don’t include it nor do they refer to any instrument used to measure the dimensions
• They perform a chi-square test, which is a test normally used to assess differences in group proportions. Later, the authors reported a simple linear regression formula, which makes no sense. To perform linear regression, the dependent variable would need to be measured using an interval or ratio method. To confuse things even more, in the conclusions and suggestions section, the authors report they performed ordinal regression.
• In the paper’s conclusions and suggestions, the authors report they find evidence of mediating factors (e.g., brand trust, brand belief, brand advocacy). Mediating factors between what and what?

Taking into account potential English-language conversion issues (this is an Indian journal), this is still just an extremely poor study. I’ve already sent a letter to the editor to have this article retracted for the reasons mentioned in this blog. This will be a great teaching item for all my marketing, research methods, and statistics students this term.