Study On Forming Mechanism Of Seryice Brand Competitiveness

Worldwide, service economy is increasingly becoming the dominant economic development, and market competition is developing to an era of brand competition. Under this realistic background, service brand competitiveness has become a mutual concern in both the academic community and the industry. However, most of the existing research of brand competitiveness focuses on product brand of the manufacturing industry, research of service brand is far from sufficient. Therefore, this dissertation chose the forming mechanism of service brand competitiveness as a research topic, trying to find key factors that affect competitiveness of service brand theoretically, and to seek effective ways to cultivate and enhance service brand competitiveness.The research analyzed and tried to solve two major issues. The first, what are key antecedents of service brand competitiveness? Existing research has summarized the sources of brand competitiveness, but most research is based on study of the scopes of manufacturing industry, and mainly from the enterprise perspective. Service brand research literature has explored the impact factors of service performance mainly from the customer perspective. The value creation dominated by service economy is "co-creation" logic. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt a new research perspective, to explore key sources of service brand competitiveness. The second, how do these antecedents affect service brand competitiveness? Existing research lacks a thorough and systematic analysis of the forming mechanism of service brand competitiveness, and actual evidence test is especially scarce. By integrating theoretical analysis and empirical analysis, making the forming mechanism of service brand competitiveness clear, then it is possible to provide targeted guidance on strategies and approaches for service enterprises seeking to improve brand competitiveness.This research began with a review of relevant literatures on enterprises competitiveness, band competitiveness and service brands. Then from a new perspective--brand ontology perspective, the research analyzed the source elements of service brand competitiveness, with the combination of theoretical analysis on the forming mechanism of brand competitiveness, we obtained an analysis framework of "service brand differential advantagesâ†'customer perceived value advantagesâ†'service brand competitiveness".Corresponding to the "integrated three phases" service brand model, based on the application of the exploratory factor analysis(EFA), the research divided service brand differential advantages into four dimensions:service interaction advantages, brand basic advantages, brand communication and display aadvantages, as well as brand cultural advantages. Furthermore, customer perceived values of service brand are divided into three dimensions:functional value, emotional value and social value. Service brand competitiveness is measured from four dimensions:brand market performance, brand popularity, brand satisfaction and brand loyalty. In this way, the analytical framework of the service brand competitiveness forming mechanism is developed into a conceptual model. By choosing102service brands from banking industry and hotel industry as survey samples, and using SPSS, LISREL statistical analysis software, and applying the structural equation method, this dissertation carried on an empirical study to test the concept model and its research hypotheses. As a result, some new conclusions have been drawn.Following are the main findings of this research:First, service brand is a process-based brand, which is different from the physical product brand of manufacturing industry. Service process is not only the process of service production and delivery, but also the process of brand communication. Ccustomers’ perception of the value of service mainly comes from service interaction in service process and brand communication and display. Service interaction has a significant positive impact on customer perceived functional value, emotional value and social value. Under our current bank and hotel service scenarios, Excessive brand communication and display seems to show negative effect on customer perception of functional value, emotional value and social value.Secondly, customers’ perceived values of service brand can be divided into three dimensions:functional value, emotional value and social value. Social value is the main driving factors for the formation of service brand competitiveness, followed by the emotional value, the final is functional value. Thirdly, service brand differential advantages affect customers’ perceived values, thereby affecting the formation of service brand competitiveness. Therefore, service brand differential advantages are source of service brand competitiveness, where customer perceived value play a mediating role. That is, by transforming to customer perceived value advantages, service brand differential advantages forms the service brand competitiveness.Fourth, both high-leveled customer satisfaction and loyalty for service brand will eventually form a strong support for excellent market performance of service brand in market competition.Compared with other related studies, innovations of this study are mainly reflected in three aspects. First, the research put forward an "integrated three phases" brand ontological model.Based on the model, the research developed and verified a measurement scale for service brand differential advantages. Second, the research enriched the mechanism analysis framework of "service brand differential advantagesâ†'customer perceived value advantagesâ†'service brand competitiveness", and provided actual evidence to test it. Empirical evidence indicates that service interaction advantages play an important role in forming service brand competitiveness. Third, Empirical evidence also revealed that customers’ perceived values of service brand could be divided into three dimensions:functional value, emotional value and social value. Social value and emotional value have more important effect on service brand competitiveness than functional value.