The Effects of Price Consciousness, Brand Consciousness and Familiarity on Store Brand Purchase Intention

Abstract

Trusted national manufacturers produce all store brand productsP; the quality is equal to that of national brands (Richardson, Jain and Dick 1996)., However, many studies have found that consumers’ perceive store brand products as inferior in quality to the corresponding national brands (Fugate 1979). Research findings from Richardson, Dick and Jain (1994) have shown that consumers mainly use extrinsic product cues to assess the quality of a store brand. Since both price and brand are the extrinsic cues most often used by consumers to evaluate product quality, Dodds, Monroe and Grewal (1991) and Richardson, Jain and Dick (1996) found that the familiarity of store brands influenced the use of extrinsic cues. Therefore, do store brands attract consumers who care more about prices, consumers who care more about the brand, or consumers who care more about store brand familiarity? It is necessary to clarify these issues in order to formulate effective marketing communication strategies. Previous research has separately explored store brand proneness from the perspective of price consciousness (Batra and Sinha 2000) and the perspective of store brand familiarity (Richardson, Jain and Dick 1996), but not from both perspectives simultaneously. In addition, little literature examinesd relevant topics from the perspective of brand consciousness. Since price and brand are important extrinsic cues, both the consumer’s attitude toward price and brand, along with the influence of his store brand familiarity, should be examined together. Such an approach can clearly indentify the characteristics of the store brand’s target consumers and the multifaceted influences related to store brand purchase intention. In addition, perceived risk plays an important role in the consumer choice of store brand or national brand (Erdem, Zhao and Valenzuela 2004). It is worth further study to quantify the nature of the relationships. Variables such as price consciousness, brand consciousness, and store brand familiarity may directly influence purchase intention, or they may indirectly influence purchase intention via a mediation of perceived risk. Since store brands use lower price as their main appeal, con-