Consumer purchase behaviour for new brand product

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.