We investigated the impact of brand image on brand loyalty, and assessed the mediating role of brand experience in this relationship. The sample comprised 439 consumers in China. The results showed ...there was a significant positive correlation between brand image and brand loyalty. Additionally,
brand experience played a mediating role in this relationship. Our research findings contribute to better understanding of the relationships between brand image, brand loyalty, and brand experience among consumers in China. These discoveries also offer practical insights for business operators
seeking to enhance consumer brand loyalty. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.
Costly signaling theory provides an explanation for why humans are willing to a pay a premium for conspicuous products such as luxury brand-labeled clothing or conspicuous environmentally friendly ...cars. According to the theory, the extra cost of such products is a signal of social status and wealth and leads to advantages in social interactions for the signaler. A previous study found positive evidence for the case of luxury brand labels. However, an issue of this study was that some of the experiments were not conducted in a perfectly double-blind manner. I resolved this by replicating variations of the original design in a double-blind procedure. Additionally, besides the luxury label condition, I introduced a "green" label condition. Thus, the hypothesis that signaling theory is able to explain pro-environmental behavior was tested for the first time in a natural field setting. Further, I conducted experiments in both average and below-average socioeconomic neighborhoods, where, according to signaling theory, the effects of luxury signals should be even stronger. In contrast to the original study, I did not find positive effects of the luxury brand label in any of the five experiments. Nor did I find evidence for a green-signaling effect. Moreover, in poor neighborhoods a negative tendency of the luxury label actually became evident. This suggests that a signaling theory explanation of costly labels must take into account the characteristics of the observers, e.g. their social status.
•A new tool is proposed for measuring parent’s choice criteria for infant food brands.•Qualitative and quantitative data were used to develop and validate the scale.•The scale is significantly ...correlated to brand familiarity, satisfaction and loyalty.
The study of the motives that parents take into account when making commercial infant food choices is important because these choices determine what infants eat. Food given to children during infancy has a major impact on their health, development and growth. This article describes the development and validation of an instrument for capturing parent’s choice criteria for infant food brands (PCCIFB). A structured empirical scale development procedure was followed to develop this new tool. Items were generated from 18 in-depth interviews and one focus group with parents of children under 18months in Spain. The psychometric properties of the scale were successfully assessed on two samples of parents (n=197 and n=649). The multidimensional 11-item scale offers insights into the most relevant attributes, grouped in three factors (reputation/liking, environmental/social and convenience/price), that determine parents’ brand choice of commercial infant foods (i.e., formula milk, infant cereals and jarred baby foods). The scale dimensions were significantly and positively correlated to key brand variables, namely, brand familiarity, brand satisfaction and brand loyalty. Implications and future research opportunities are discussed.
Nowadays, brand choice models are standard tools in quantitative marketing. In most applications, parameters representing brand intercepts and covariate effects are assumed to be constant over time. ...However, marketing theories, as well as the experience of marketing practitioners, suggest the existence of trends or short-term variations in particular parameters. Hence, having constant parameters over time is a highly restrictive assumption, which is not necessarily justified in a marketing context and may lead to biased inferences and misleading managerial insights.
In this paper, we develop flexible, heterogeneous multinomial logit models based on penalized splines to estimate time-varying parameters. The estimation procedure is fully data-driven, determining the flexible function estimates and the corresponding degree of smoothness in a unified approach. The model flexibly accounts for parameter dynamics without any prior knowledge needed by the analyst or decision maker. Thus, we position our approach as an exploratory tool that can uncover interesting and managerially relevant parameter paths from the data without imposing assumptions on their shape and smoothness.
Our approach further allows for heterogeneity in all parameters by additively decomposing parameter variation into time variation (at the population level) and cross-sectional heterogeneity (at the individual household level). It comprises models without time-varying parameters or heterogeneity, as well as random walk parameter evolutions used in recent state space models, as special cases. The results of our extensive model comparison suggest that models considering parameter dynamics and household heterogeneity outperform less complex models regarding fit and predictive validity. Although models with random walk dynamics for brand intercepts and covariate effects perform well, the proposed semiparametric approach still provides a higher predictive validity for two of the three data sets analyzed.
For joint estimation of all regression coefficients and hyperparameters, we employ the publicly available software BayesX, making the proposed approach directly applicable.
Consumer-brand relationships encompass several dimensions, most of which have attracted growing research attention during the last years. Building these relationships is especially important in the ...marketing 3.0 era, where it is suggested that customers will choose those brands that satisfy their deepest needs. With these ideas in mind, this article provides a review of two key concepts implied in such relationships: brand love and customer engagement. Although both conceptions focus on different stages of consumer-brand relationships, they actually cover different perspectives on the same process. Moreover, they come from diverse conceptual paradigms: whilst brand love comes from the psychology discipline, engagement derives from diverse areas of the marketing field (e.g., the service-dominant logic perspective). However, their further empirical developments have taken place in marketing. Besides, both terms appear to be applied to different empirical perspectives: brand love is usually linked to the Fast Moving Consumer Goods industry and customer engagement to services.
The purpose of this article is to study the direct and indirect relationship between brand experience and brand loyalty. The authors propose that the relationship is mediated by affective commitment. ...A survey-based quantitative approach is used to test the hypotheses based on the proposed theoretical model that delineates the relationships between brand experience, affective commitment and brand loyalty. The data were collected using traditional pen and paper as well as online surveys and were analysed using Structural Equations Modelling. The analysis suggests that affective commitment mediates the relationship between brand experience and brand loyalty for all three product categories that were studied (cars, laptops and sneakers). The article extends the understanding of the brand experience construct by studying its influence on brand loyalty and also by incorporating affective commitment as a mediating variable. In our sample, the findings support the fact that developing brand experience influences customer loyalty only through affective commitment.
It has been established that consumers are often loss averse in the sense that perceived value decreases to a greater extent as a result of a price increase than what it increases as a result of an ...equal price decrease. We examine a previously scarcely studied question: how is the change in a product's perceived value following a price change reflected in the product's market demand? To complement the notion of loss averse (vs. gain seeking) price behaviour in perceived value, we provide a definition for loss averse (vs. gain seeking) price behaviour in demand. We discover that loss aversion in value does not necessarily lead to loss averse market demand, but can also lead to market demand being gain-seeking. We examine the boundary conditions for loss averse vs. gain seeking demand. Assuming that consumer preferences are given by a random utility model and the choice model is McFadden's conditional logit, we develop a simple formula to check the character of the price behaviour. This provides novel insights by revealing an unexpected key determinant: the market share of the product under consideration. Finally, we consider the optimal price changes and what kind of consumer behaviour in demand they are related to.
The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of online social networking site activities on brand choice for health-related businesses; the study also explored the mediating impact of brand ...perception on the connection of online social networking site activities and brand choice in health-related businesses. A self-administered questionnaire was used for data collection from 300 customers, randomly selected from health sector businesses in Pakistan. The findings indicate that online social networking site activities had a substantial influence on customers’ brand choice in health-related businesses and that brand perception mediates the connection between online social networking site activities and customers’ brand choice in health-related businesses. The research also recognized the increasing significance of online social networking sites in health-related businesses. The study offers insights for health-related companies and their managers on visualizing brand perception as well.
Purpose
Existing research neglected examining the environmental effect of an event on the effectiveness of sponsorship activation in a competitive setting. The purpose of this study is to explore how ...the event environment impacts consumers’ attitudinal and behavioral responses to competitive brands that co-present at an event.
Design/methodology/approach
The research comprised an exploratory pre-test and two studies at a sport event with a retailing environment. The exploratory pre-test was used to examine the competitive relationship in the local market between the market leader and the lesser-known sponsoring brand. Study 1 used structural equation modelling to test how the event environment impacts consumers’ attitudes toward both brands at the post-consumption stage. Study 2 compared actual sales data of the two competing brands to examine the immediate effect of the sponsorship space on consumption.
Findings
The results revealed the event environment had an impact on consumers’ brand attitude toward both the lesser known sponsoring brand and the non-sponsoring market leader. However, the effect on the sponsoring brand that activated its sponsorship was influenced by consumer involvement with the event and was more salient. Furthermore, the product sales of the less-known sponsoring brand outperformed that of the market leader that co-presented at the event.
Originality/value
This study addresses a call to go beyond exploring the brand image of the sponsoring brands in isolation and holistically examine sponsorship effectiveness. The study contributes to knowledge on both attitudinal and actual behavioural outcomes of sponsorship activation in a competitive environment.
Purpose
A comprehensive operational framework is proposed to explain young consumers’ (i.e. generations Y and Z) engagement with brands on social media sites (SMSs). This paper aims to synthesize two ...motivational theories: uses and gratifications (U&G) theory and the technology acceptance model (TAM).
Design/methodology/approach
A selective literature review was conducted to examine recent publications related to young consumers’ brand-driven engagement behavior on SMSs in which either TAM or U&G theory was applied. A three-stage method was used: an initial search was followed by vertical and horizontal searches and then a targeted search of scholarly publications. At each stage, the university’s library databases and Google Scholar were searched for relevant, mainly peer-reviewed articles, using appropriate filters and keywords. The articles’ references and the studies that cited those articles were added to the initially identified research pool (vertical search), coupled with publications of a similar nature based on keywords (horizontal search). The final stage, the targeted search, involved identifying and adding specific articles (e.g. literature reviews and integrated models).
Findings
After a review of a significant number of U&G and TAM studies, similarities and differences of the two theories were identified, and an integrated operational framework was developed. Based on empirical findings of existing U&G and TAM studies, testable propositions were presented.
Research limitations/implications
The proposed hybrid model and the associated propositions provide a research opportunity to empirically examine how young consumers’ motivational (i.e. motivating and demotivating) drivers, normative influence, perceived value and attitudes (toward brand content and engagement) predict intention or actual brand-related behavior on SMSs.
Practical implications
Much of current research indicates that generations Y and Z (“digital natives”) spend considerably more time on SMSs than any of the older generations (“digital immigrants”). Thus, brands that aim to target this cohort need to develop successful engagement strategies (e.g. gamification and influencer marketing) on current and emerging SMSs. The suggested conceptualization provides guidelines for companies to effectively use such communication strategies to motivate young people to engage with their brands on sites such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
Originality/value
A review of TAM research indicates that it lacks rich motivating/demotivating constructs, and thus borrows from other theories to complement this weakness. An examination of U&G frameworks, particularity Ducoffe (1996)-based models, indicates that these frameworks mainly test engagement with social media advertising but seldom other types of brand-driven engagement on SMSs. In addition, many U&G studies focus less than TAM studies do on outcome variables such as behavioral intentions and behavior. Thus, the authors propose a synthesized U&G and TAM framework that mitigates both theories’ weaknesses and builds on their strengths, enriching the growing research on brand-driven engagement behavior via SMSs.
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