Shallow Research On Chinese Brand Rigidity

Professor Hans in Harvard Business School have once said eight years before those fifteen years ago, companies competed on price; today they competed on quality; but, they will compete on brand tomorrow. Brand is one of the most important competence factors in 21 Century. And brand Value lie a lot on brand positioning. Whether brand position can deliver the unique attribute and brand image information is very important to the competence of the brand.Ries have once said that the brand is just like elastic, as you extend one more category, it will be one weaker. I think the comparison is very suitable, it means that brand could be extend while it must face the resistance, and the "elastic" would be snap when the extension is too far. Furthermore, that different stretch elastics could endure the strain must be different and different brand, different resistance, and different similarity of brand extension that it could endure.When reading the books and papers on brand, I found that brand have a attribute that the brand position in consumers' mind would not easily be changed when companies hope that they could change the position, and I called it "Brand Rigidity". In my opinion, the change of the brand position contains the re-constitute the brand positioning strategic and the change of the relationship between brand and products, as brand extension and brand counterextension. Most theory of the evaluation to the change is about brand extension, and as the lack of uniform theory, I think the present of the brand rigidity is very necessary.By way of research the brand rigidity better, the author put forth that brand rigidity is composed of brand rigidity modulus and similarity. And brand rigidity means the difficulty of a unit's change while the company hopes that brand position in consumers' mind could change as they want. According to theory of David A. Aaker and Kevin Lane Keller, I post four hypotheses that brand width, name awareness, perceived quality, and brand association influence the brand rigidity modulus.The author designs two questionnaires to Chinese consumer and American consumer. Through investigation, the author not only examines the hypotheses of brand rigidity modulus model, but analyzes the difference of the consumer preference between china and America by the investigation results, and found brand rigidity in America is apparently higher than China if other refer factors is similar. It is obvious that the environment carries weight to brand rigidity modulus.And the author analyzes the reason of the difference from consumer preference, history, law environment etc. And I examine my opinion through the results of investigation. The author conclude three reason that influence brand rigidity modulus, such as the different way the quality perceived, such as the difference of the approval of the...