investigating the relationship between perceived service quality and customer loyalty with an emphasis on the mediating role of business image and trust in sport businesses

in today's competitive environment, branding is considered as a mechanism to help businesses in order to achieve competitive advantages. due to perceived service quality, business image and customer trust, branding, as an important concept in the sports marketing, is created for organizations. the aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between perceived service quality and customer loyalty with an emphasis on the mediating role of business image and customer trust in sport businesses. the research methodology was descriptive-survey type. the population consisted of active sport businesses in tehran province. 160 entrepreneurs were selected from the population of sport entrepreneurs (n=270) using cochran formula. the quantitative data were collected by distribution of questionnaires and stratified sampling method. to analyze data and test the hypotheses, structural equation modeling (sem) and partial least squares (pls) were administered using lisrel 8.5 software. findings showed a direct and significant relationship between perceived service quality and customer loyalty. business image and customer trust mediated the relationship between perceived service quality and customer loyalty.