An Empirical Research On The Components Of Retail Brand Image

As an important sector of national economy, the retail industry is closely related with people's daily life. In recent years, the world's leading retail brands enter the China market in a big way, which bring opportunities for local retailers as well as challenges. To take an active part in the competition, it is necessary for the local retail enterprises to study the consumer's behaviors actively, working hard to meet their changing needs and wants, especially trying to create a favorable brand image in their minds.Strong brand image can reduce the risk perception of consumers during their shopping process, and thus to improve their satisfaction and loyalty. As an important competitive advantage, a good brand image can bring strong brand equity and provide a basis for the brand extension. At present, most of the studies on the brand image take tangible products as an example, and only few of them are about the service sector. Moreover, from the research methods perspective, we found that most of the scholars have identified the components of brand image mainly through literature review; this may lead to the omission of some of the important image factors. Image lay in consumers' minds; only by empirical research can we identify the component of brand image and the important factors. This study aimed to identify the constructs of the retail brand image from the consumer's perspective, develop the retail brand image model and a retail brand scale which may do some help to the brand building and management.We had a focus group interview and conducted a questionnaire survey in Jinan, Qingdao, Yantai and Weihai. Based on the statistical analysis of the survey data, we found that the retail brand image is a multidimensional concept, which is composed of "equipments" , "product quality" and "presentation", " prices" and "architecture" , "convenience" and "atmosphere". We also found that there are close links among these dimensions. For example, the consumer's perception of "product quality" has a significant positive correlation with "equipment" , "architecture" and "presentation" ; while "equipment", "product quality" and "presentation" have significant positive correlation with the perception of consumer's "prices". The findings also show that compared with international retail brand names, local retail brand names have a higher awareness.The innovation herein mainly includes: we identify the components of retail brand image from the consumer perspective by a standard empirical research, the findings can be considered as supplementary to the brand theory. At the same time, we develop a retail brand image model and a retail brand image scale, which may do some help for the brand building and management of local retail enterprises.