A Study Of Brand Knowledge Development And Influencing Factors Among Children Aged 3 To 5

Brand knowledge is all the thoughts, perceptual images, experiences and faith towards one particular brand. It is considered relatively with consumers’ brand awareness (brand recognition and brand recall), as well as the ability of brand representations ability and brand symbolism learning. It has been widely considered that the procedure of brand knowledge development is highly connected with one’s cognitive ability and social development. Because preschoolers lacked of brand experiences, whose cognition ability also haven’t fully developed, there were only little systematic research on brand knowledge of 3-5years’ children. Based on the particular sample of preschool children aged 3-5, this study aims to evaluate the three stages of brand knowledge development from basic to advance, as well as the main effecting factor that may influence the variables.For the research, three experiments were tested to determine the final conclusion. Experiment Ⅰ investigated children’s brand awareness, mainly about the development of brand recognition and brand recall; and the relationship of advertising exposure with these two. The experimental procedure to test brand recognition/recall ability was adopted by Valkenburg and Buijzen(2005). A questionnaire regarding with children’s basic information was sent to the parents to get the frenquency they expose to TV commercial everyday. The stimuli brands were also selected according to the result of the questionnaire. By comparing the results, the correlation of brand recognition/recall and the exposure to television advertisement would be got.Experiment Ⅱ investigated preschooler’s brand representation ability and the correlation of brand representation ability with executive function. There were two sessions in this experiment. The first session focused on investigating children’s brand presentation ability, by adopting McAlister’s collage test which with stimulus of high scored brands from previous experiment, showing children a pair of competitive brands once a time. The second session was designed to test children’s executive function ability by adopting "route navigation" task from Cole and Mitchell(2000) and "puppet inhibition" task from Reid, Pein and Rothbart(1984). The correlation of brand representation ability and executive ability was discussed in the end.ExperimentⅢ investigated preschoolers’brand symbolism understanding, and the correlation between brand symbolism and theory of mind. This experiment included two sessions. The first session tested children’s understanding of brand symbolism, requiring subjects to answer questions towards brand quality, brand popularity and purchase intention, by adopting McAlister and Corwell(2010)’s brand symbolization tests. The second session was designed to find out the correlation between brand symbolism and theory of mind, including standard misleading container task, adopted by Gopnik and Astington(1988), Well and Liu(2004), and another one from Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith(1985)’s "Sally-Ann"task.The results have shown that:(1) The brand knowledge ability of children aged 3-5 develops over age. To be specific, it grows slowly and unstable at age of 3 and 4,while growing fast at age of 5. Children aged 3-5 have possessed basic brand knowledge including brand recognition, brand recall, and started to show advanced brand knowledge such as brand representation and brand symbolism.(2) Children aged 3-5 perform a better job with brands(especially children brand) that they are familiar with.(3) Level of television advertisement exposure has a positive correlation with brand recognition among children aged 3-5, which means the more exposure children have with television advertisement, the better ability they would have on brand recognition ability. There is no correlation has been found of television advertisement with brand recall ability.(4) Level of executive function development has a positive correlation with brand representation ability among children aged 3-5, which means the higher level of executive function children have developed, the better level of brand representation ability they may have.(5) Level of theory of mind has a positive correlation with brand symbolism among children aged 3-5, which means the higher level of theory of mind children have developed, the better level of brand symbolism they may have.