Exploring The Impact Of Brand On Consumer Behavior

Problem Statement

Explore the impact of brand on consumer behavior.

The aim of this research is to explore the impact of brand on consumer behavior. For this, a proposal has been prepared highlighting the methods that would be used for conducting the research. The problem statement has been explored in the current section to identify the key objectives of the research and a literature study would be conducted and presented in the next section to identify the constructs that can be used for analyzing the impacts of brand on the consumer behavior.

With more and more businesses coming into being, there is high competition in any field of business in the modern world. In this situation, branding plays a critical role in creating awareness which gives an edge to a brand over competition as the customer is able to recognize the product. Moreover, stronger brands not just create awareness and recognition but also bring loyalty in their customers so that customers have preferences for them. The loyalty of a customer towards a brand can have a significant influence on the buyer’s behavior. However, building a loyal customer base requires creation of a strong image in a market. This can be built by shaping experiences of customers in such a way that they start to value the brand and its services. For organizations planning to create a brand or making their brand stronger, it is very important to understand how brands create impact on consumer behavior as the insights can help them plan their branding strategies to support their business objectives by getting them customer loyalty. This study would make an attempt to understand how brands can create impact on the consumers today.

The aim of this research is to understand the impact of branding on the consumer behavior. To achieve this aim, following questions are needed to be answered in the research:

• How closely are brands and the consumer behavior related?
• What are various strategies which can be used by the organizations to make brand popular among people
• How brand image helps in increasing the brand loyalty
• What is the relationship of brand image and customer satisfaction?

Based on these research questions, following research objectives can be formulated:

• Understanding relationship between branding and consumer behavior
• Explore branding strategies used by popular organizations
• Understanding loyalty and the impact of brand on loyalty
• Understanding the impact of brand image on customer satisfaction

For understanding brand, a number of constructs may be studied here as they can explain a brand. These include brand image, customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and brand equity. For understand the consumer side, customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and brand equity would be the important constructs to study. In this section, the past literature on the subject is explored to understand these constructions and the connection between them so that the objective of exploring the impact of brand on consumer behavior can be studied.

Aims and Objectives of Research

A concept of brand has been explained by the American Marketing Association that defines a brand as a construct including name, symbol, term, design or any combination of these that is used for identifying services or goods of a seller or a group of sellers so that they are differentiated from their competition. The brand image makes the common perception that affects the purchases by consumers and create an influence towards the brand with a stronger image as compared to competition. Thus, branding can be understood by studying the concept of brand image and related constructs (Myllärniemi, 2015).

Brand Image is defined by Kotler as “the set of beliefs, ideas, and impression that a person holds regarding an object” and Keller as “a set of perceptions about a brand as reflected by brand associations in consumer’s memory”.  Brand image is the perception that is formed in a consumers mind while making a purchase of a product or a service about the associated brand. If the purchase of a customer is satisfactory, there is a higher probability of shaping a good brand image in the consumer mind. Customer satisfaction also influences the loyalty of the customer towards the brand. A strong correlation exists between the brand image and the intention of a buyer towards the development of loyalty. Customer satisfaction can also be seen as the benchmark for the measurement of customer loyalty as a satisfied customer is more likely to display loyalty towards a brand. Establishment of the brand image is one of the most important function of marketing. People do not make purchases just for the product and associated attributes they have but also for some psychological benefits such as the feeling high self-esteem. Product performance also shapes the brand image. Consumers have both cultural and social values attached to a brand.

Customer satisfaction is one of the key factors that determine the loyalty for a brand in a customer. It is influenced by the expectations and experiences of the customers with the services received from the brand. Expectations are defined before a purchase is made while experience is formed after the purchase is made by a customer. Customers get satisfied when the level of performance experienced is higher than the expectations and it is called the positive disconfirmation. Negative disconfirmation happens when the expectations are higher than the experience. When a match happens between expectation and experience the a neutral satisfaction is achieved. This disconfirmation of the expectation determines the level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction in a customer. Higher is the quality of service experiences, higher is the level of satisfaction, and this results in the higher loyalty of the customer. Customer satisfaction is a key to success of a brand and can give an organization a competitive edge. When high satisfaction is achieved for a long term in a customer, the life time value of the brand for the customer is higher. Quality of a product or service, value of the brand, and the satisfaction from purchase together influence the consumer behavior. The brand value and the customer satisfaction can shape the purchase intension of a customer. A satisfied customer can save the efforts of the company put into attracting new customers by bringing positive word of mouth working for them.  

Literature Review

Brand loyalty can be classified into attitudinal, behavioral, and composite approaches as per the branding literature. Behavioral loyalty refers to the frequency of the repeat purchase by a customer. Attitudinal loyalty refers to stated preferences and purchase intensions. The composite approach to defining loyalty combines the two approaches and defines brand loyalty as a biased response of a customer such as a purchase that is expressed over a time by a decision-making unit with respect to a brand (Upamannyu & Bhakar, 2014).

To gain loyalty of customers, marketers have to work on building trust in the customers. Trust is gained by providing superior value and high quality services to customers. A benefit of getting loyalty in a customer is that a loyal customer is less sensitive to price variations. Brand loyalty is created with building of trust and a positive brand impact. Trust is important as it can lead to a repurchase and thus, help in retaining a customer. Expectations and experiences directly affect the brand loyalty as well as indirectly through creating a direct impact on the trust in customers (Ghafoor, et al., 2012).

Brand image and the attitude of the customer towards a brand together form the brand equity. A good brand image can enhance the loyalty in customers bring thus, bring in more revenues thereby increasing the brand equity. Brand equity can be measured by evaluating a brand on different parameters such as the premium price that is charged, the increase which is seen in the volume of sales, prices of the shares of the brand, and more. Brand awareness, associations, and brand loyalty are the key factors that shape band  equity positively. Brand loyalty is one such significant construction that can affect the equity of a brand and build a positive one which is beneficial to a brand it would benefit the associated organization in several ways including increase in revenues and the share value of the company.

With the advent of ecommerce, consumers and sellers are brought closer and the customers can have direct connect with a brand such that they can also communicate with the brand through feedback systems. A variety of benefits that ecommerce brings to consumers such as low price guarantees, purchase convenience, direct connection with brands, and a large number of variety available have boosted the count of consumers who make online purchases today. For the brands, ecommerce presents a great opportunity to analyses the behavior of consumers to understand them so that a more personalized experience can be generated while planning marketing strategies. Personalized interactions like order confirmation and delivery schedule information can happen over emails, ecommerce notifications, personal messages, calls or chats with service representatives. However, with ecommerce also comes stiff competition that is not just faced locally but globally in the internet space and thus, strong branding plays even more crucial role in the online space. While brick and mortar models would still sell only with greater availability of goods than competition, the online space resolves the problem of availability for the consumer who can find any product from any online seller. Thus, the brands that want to sell more to consumers have to rely more on their marketing and branding efforts if the attention of the costumer has to be gained in between the large number of consumers. Companies that have stronger brands have build strong trust levels in consumers which brings them again and again to the ecommerce websites of the trusted brands. Further, satisfied online consumers become brand ambassadors and spread the word of mount online. Taking about the brand in public through the digital media gives the consumer opportunity to reach to a large number of other consumers which is much more beneficial for the brand than in the case of the physical model in which only a few people could be talked to by the consumers as a measure of WOM marketing (Penttinen & Turunen, 2017).

Amazon is one of the largest ecommerce organizations that was formed in 1994 by Jeff Bezos who began as an online book retailer but over the years, company spread its operations into a large number of goods. The company had a operating income of over $4 billion as per the latest 2017 figures. It runs a variety of stores as its subsidiaries including Audible, Whole food market, Amazon, Zappos, and more. However, this study would be focused on the flagship product or portal of the company and that is Amazon.com which would be explored to understand how consumers form brand image and how their online behavior is affected by the branding constructs that have bee identified in the literature of the current research. As Amazon makes one of the huge retailers, it would give researcher an opportunity to reach out to a large number of consumers and thus, have a wider representative sample for understanding consumer behavior in the modern information driven era of ecommerce.

The past literature on the subject revealed that studies have been conducted on the concept of branding by a large number of researchers and these included exploration of constructs like brand image, customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. However, there were very few studies that were found to be exploring the concept of brand equity and loyalty as related. Also, the researches mostly focused on a single product or series provided by a direct company which tested a niche set of consumers. For a wider understanding of consumers in the age of ecommerce, a larger population needs to be studied. These gaps would be filled in the current research by exploring the key four constructs including customer satisfaction, brand image, brand loyalty, and brand equity for the ecommerce consumers taking the case of Amazon as the platform for the consumers.

In this section, the research methodology that would be used for conducting the research for exploring identified constructs and testing them using statistical procedures to achieve the aim of the research is explained.

This research aims to explore the impact of brand on consumer behavior. As found in the literature that the brand is defined in the consumers mind by a number of factors including brand image, brand attribute, and brand equity out of which brand images makes the most measureable component  of the constructs, this research would make use brand image as a the component of branding for measurement. Similarly, the consumer behavior is found to be shaped by a number of different factors including customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. As brand image is formed at the time of a purchase and the customer satisfaction is outcome of this purchase, the study would explore the impact of brand image on customer satisfaction (Holden, 2001). Customer satisfaction in the long run gets loyalty in a customer and thus, the is affected significantly. Thus, the customer satisfaction can influence brand loyalty in the customer. To be able to explore the complete impact of brand image not just at the time of purchase but also the behavior throughout a consumer journey, the impact of customer satisfaction on brand loyalty can be explored which would give an understanding of the indirect connection between brand image and brand loyalty. Thus, the research would also explore the impact of customer satisfaction on brand loyalty. Thus, the research would test the two basic assumptions discovered in the research that include impact of brand image on brand loyalty, impact of customer satisfaction on brand which would give a comprehensive view (GRAY, 2016). Thus, this research would have two hypothesis to test and these would include:

H1: Brand image has a significant impact on the brand loyalty

H2: Customer satisfaction has a significant impact on the brand loyalty

Ecommerce makes one of the most attractive business model and a huge number of consumers are making purchases online through many popular ecommerce websites such as Amazon, Tesco, and more. In this research, the case of Amazon as the online ecommerce brand would be used as it has a very strong presence in the online space and has a very strong brand in the consumers mind. Lessons from Amazon can help researcher explore how each branding measure taken by Amazon has affected the consumer behavior in the online space. Thus, in order to collect the data from ecommerce consumers, a random sample of 100 consumers who have made at least one purchase from the Amazon store would be taken (CRESWELL, 2000).

The data would be collected using a questionnaire that would be distributed to the respondents through an online survey. This survey would be distributed to 100 Amazon customers who have made at least one purchase online. The respondents would be emailed the survey which would be put online on Survey Monkey platform. If they are not responding to the email, the researcher would personally contact them and take the responses over the call. The data collected would be in objective format and would thus, be coded into SPSS for the testing of hypothesis (Kothari, 2004).

The collected data would be tested using statistical tests on the SPSS software where the data would be coded and entered. Following hypothesis would be tested in the research:

H1: Brand image has a significant impact on the brand loyalty

H2: Customer satisfaction has a significant impact on the brand loyalty

For the testing of the hypothesis, a number statistical constructs would be used including descriptive statistics to understand demographics and Pearson correlation and multiple regression analyses to understand the impact of brand image on loyalty, customer satisfaction on loyalty and loyalty on brand equity. The correlation test would reveal if there is any relationship between the variables tested while R square value obtained from the regression test would reveal the level of variation that is caused in brand loyalty or brand equity due to the brand image, customer satisfaction or brand loyalty (Kothari, 2004).

As the research is making use of the primary data and involving respondents in the survey, the researcher would be taking care of some codes of ethics associated with primary researches including maintenance of confidentiality, respecting privacy of respondents, and taking informed consent from them (Kaiser, 2009). For this, the researcher would ensure to not collect any personal identity information from the respondents but only the details necessary for understanding the demographics. To maintain confidentiality, the research would ensure to not share any data obtain from any of the respondents outside of the research and once the whole research is completed, the data collected would be deleted by the researcher. The researcher would take  the written consent from the respondents before they could participate in the survey. For this, the researcher would explain the purpose of research and would seek permission from respondents at the beginning of the questionnaire such that every respondent answering the questionnaire online knows the purpose of the research and is comfortable sharing the information (Halej, 2017).

Data that is obtained from the research must be authentic. If the research questionnaire has the bias, this would not be possible and thus, the researcher would first test the questionnaire on the peers to identify if there is any bias which could be reflected by the skewed responses. In case of any bias or logical mistake found in the questionnaire, the same would be corrected before sending the questionnaire to actual respondents. Data validation is a triangulation strategy that involve assurance of the fact that the sample collected is the true representative of the population chosen for a research. Removal of the bias from the questionnaire would to an extent ensure that the data is proper and obtain the responses authentically (Halej, 2017).

This research uses only 100 as a the sample size which is very small for an ecommerce platform that actually has a huge customer base and thus, the results may not be generalized to a large audience which is the limitation of this research. Another limitation is that the research only tests already made assumptions and does not make any attempt to create a new construct or theory to explain the impact of the brand on the consumer behavior. There are limited constructs that are used for the measurement of the impact of brand on consumer behavior that are based on the insights obtained from past researches only.

Conclusions

The research has aim to understand the impact of brand on the consumer behavior. For understanding consumer behavior, band loyalty and brand equity are chosen as the key constructs. For measuring brand value, brand image and customer satisfaction are chosen as construct after studying the existing literature on the subject. The research would form three hypothesis that would be testing the relationships between these constructs for the case of Amazon ecommerce buyers and the data obtained would be tested using descriptive statistics, correlation, and regression testing methods. The tests would reveal if there exists a significant relationship between the identified construction and if it does, to what extent customer satisfaction, brand image, and customer loyalty can have an impact on the customer loyalty.

The research would be conducted in 3 months time and the milestones of the research project are presented in the table below:

Research Task	Milestone
Proposal Preparation and submission	1st May 2018
Approval	5th May 2018
Refining project objectives and writing introduction	15th May 2018
Literature review exploration	5th June 2018
Defining methodology	10th June 2018
Questionnaire design	15th June 2018
Data Collection	25th July 2018
Data Analyses	15th August 2018
Developing discussions	20th August 2018
Writing report	25th August 2018
Report formatting, proofreading and editing	28th August 2018
Finalization and submission of report	30th August 201

References

CRESWELL, J. W., 2000. RESEARCH DESIGN: Qualitative, Quantitative, and mixed methods approaches, s.l.: Semantics Scholar.

Ghafoor, M. M., Iqbal, H. K., Tariq, U. & Murtaza, F., 2012. Impact of Customer Satisfaction and Brand Image on Brand Loyalty. Progress inBusiness Innovation & Technology Management , Volume 002, pp. 69-77.

GRAY, D. E., 2016. DOING RESEARCH in the REAL WORLD, s.l.: Sage Publications.

Halej, J., 2017. Ethics in primary research, s.l.: ECU.

Holden, M. T., 2001. Choosing the Appropriate Methodology: Understanding Research Philosophy, s.l.: Waterford Institute of Technology.

Kaiser, K., 2009. Protecting Respondent Confidentiality in Qualitative Research. Qual Health Res, pp. 1632-1641.

Kothari, C. R., 2004. Research Methodology Methods and techniques. 3rd ed. New Delhi: New Age International Publishers.

Myllärniemi, V., 2015. Literature review as a research method, s.l.: Aalto University.

Penttinen, H. & Turunen, T., 2017. E-COMMERCE AND ITS ROLE IN STRENGTHENING A BRAND, s.l.: Savonia.

Upamannyu, N. K. & Bhakar, S., 2014. Effect of Customer Satisfaction on Brand Image & Loyalty Intention: A Study of Cosmetic Product. International Journal of Research in Business and Technology , 4(1), pp. 296-307.