A brand is regarded
as an important part of a business. A good branding can elevate and
differentiate products or services over competitors. In order to build a good
brand, the product or service offer has to meet consumers' needs and wants.
Therefore, it makes the study of consumer purchase behaviour indispensable.
Last year, I had started a research on the consumer purchase behaviour
for my Master's degree in Newcastle University. The research outcome got recognized
by the professors and awarded the Best Dissertation for the course. The study seeks to examine
the differences occurring in the relative importance of product attributes
between popular brands and new brands and other factors influencing consumer
purchase behaviour for a new brand product based on existing literature. The
reason for researching the differences between the popular and new brands was
because there are many more new brands than popular brands in the market that
want to know the behaviour of their consumers in order to catch up with their
strong competitors, with their limited resources and reputation. Many existing
research neglected new brands' weakness, which is the brand influences. Brand's
reputation is built on history of creating a product satisfactorily satisfies
the consumer's wants and solves their problems. A famous brand can actually
"control" one's purchasing behaviour. Therefore, what a new brand
needs to sell their product is believed to be different from the famous brands.
The study had drafted out a few factors in
influencing the purchase decision between popular and new brands, and used
headphones as the object for researching. There are 6 hypotheses in total and one
of the hypotheses that I am writing here is to find out the significant
differences occur in the relative importance
of product attributes concerning consumer decision making with regard to the
purchase of a popular brand and a new brand product. The results showed that there are significant
differences in ranking the importance of product attributes between the popular
brand and new brand. For popular brands, the top attributes are technical
quality, price and material durability. On the other hand, for new brands, the
top attributes are technical quality, product design and price. For the least
important attribute for popular brands is product packaging and country of
origin (CoO) for new brands.
The results hold important practical
implications for the marketers or managers for new brands. The results show
that technical quality, product design and price are the top attributes for new
brands, which contains a different attribute, product design, as compared with
the popular brands. Therefore, it alerts new brands managers to increase
attention to product design rather than material durability. Furthermore, the
new brands should choose a country that they can reduce their production cost
as CoO is the least important for new brand product. Consumers will not be so
bothered by a product made in any undeveloped countries. It is important to
produce a product that suit consumer's taste and preferences, thus, building up
a product that most suited consumer's need and want is an effective way to
compete in the global competitive market.
Anyone who are researching in the similar
topics are welcome to share your thoughts and comments with me.
