The Empirical Testing Of Effects Of Price And Brand On Consumer Behavior

At present, it is an identical standpoint that brand is so important for company. As a kind of intangible assets, Brand has become the focus and core of competition among companies. Many companies have begun to set up and foster the brand belonging to them in order to achieve stronger brand and then improve the competitiveness of company.One of the results of brand competition among companies is consumers even the brand consciousness of consumers are more and more stronger. But the improvement of the brand consciousness doesn't mean that the brand loyalty has been improved. Due to the restriction and limitation of economy condition, price is still an important factor considered when most consumers according to their brand preference to make choice for shopping. Because price means the main cost of buying commodity for consumers, the influence of price to perceived value and purchase behavior of consumers is not be weaken at a certain extent.On the basis of lucubrating the theory from national and international scholars, taking the MP3 player as research object, this paper have tested the effect of brand and price during the purchase process in demonstration, as well as how consumers use the brand and price information to form perceived quality, perceived value and purchase intent of goods. Through the work of this research, on one hand, test the applicability and correction of theory from overseas in Chinese market, on the other hand, and provide the theory of consumer's purchase behavior and psychology for native companies.The whole paper is constituted with four parts. The 1st part Literature Review and Research HypothesesSurrounding the effect of brand and price on consumer's purchase behavior, we have looked back and reviewed the researches previously on the relationship of price and perceived quality, the acceptability of price, the relationship of perceived value and purchase intent and so on in this part. Price and brand are the factors that can transfer the quality information of products to consumers, and this effect is completed through forming the customer perceived value for the special product. The higher the Perceived benefits are or the lower the product price is, the higher customer perceived value is, and customers are more likely to buy it.But it doesn't mean that customers could accept all of the price level, regardless how high the price is. In fact, there is latitude of price acceptability and price thresholds in consumer's mind. When price is under the lower threshold, consumer will throw doubt upon the quality of a product and then give up buying. Moreover when price is exceeded the higher threshold, they will not buy because the product is too expensive.In the end of this part, the author has put forward some research hypotheses corresponding with the research objective.The 2nd part Research Design and MethodologyAccording to the research target and research objective, the author has put forward a whole research frame, and then test the effect of brand and price on consumer perceived quality, perceived value and purchase intent respectively under this frame; test the relationship of perceived quality, perceived value and purchase intent; finally discuss the brand preference or price preference during the process of making purchasing decision.This research adopts the measure of questionnaire, based on the research results of foreign scholar. The questionnaire design is aimed at every hypothesis, and edited correlate items measuring perceived quality, perceived value and purchase intent with a five-point Likert's scale.There are 125 pieces of effective questionnaire reclaimed. The statistic software named SPSS13.0 is used to do all of the data processing in the research.The 3rd part Data Collection and AnalysisFirstly, describe and analyze the customer characteristics, which are including sex, age, education, consumption level per month, and which brand possessed, what price is, as well as the familiarity with MP3.Secondly, change the information of original observation variables into the factor value through factor analysis after validity test, and confirm the dimensionalities of consumer perceived quality, perceived value and purchase intent.The scale of three dimensionalities has well internal consistent reliability, Cronbachαis 0.868,0.88å'Œ0.837, respectively. At the same time, the result of validity test is good. These tests have indicated the results of this research are effective and correct basically.Finally, in order to achieve the research target, respectively discuss about (1) the effect of brand on consumer perceived quality, perceived value and purchase intent; (2) the effect of price on consumer perceived quality, perceived value and purchase intent; (3) the relationship of consumer perceived quality and perceived value; (4) the relationship of consumer perceived value and purchase intent. And then test the brand and price preference of consumer used conjoint analysis.The 4th part Results and DiscussionThe research results support the hypotheses partly.The relationship of price and perceived quality is obviously positive, but the relationship of price and perceived value is negative. The higher the price is, the higher perceived quality is. But perceived value is declined alone with rising price. The negative relationship between price and perceived value suggests finding the conclusion of the negative relationship of price and purchase intent.The relationship of brand and perceived quality is obviously linear. The effect of brand on quality perceived more than 20%. The stronger the brand is, the stronger the recognition to the quality of a product for consumer. But relative to purchase intent, the effect of brand is limited. It suggests that brand is not the key cause for purchase decision-making.The relationship of perceived quality and perceived value and the relationship of perceived value and purchase intent are also linear correlation. Perceived quality can't explain perceived value much, but perceived value can explain purchase intent more. So only if consumer perceived value were improved, the business will realize.The results of conjoint analysis for the whole evaluated data indicate that the effect of price on consumer choice making is great relative to brand, whose essentiality weight is 82.58%, and the effect of brand is 17.42%.The research results suggest that most consumers have the characteristics of stronger price sensitivity now. Though their brand consciousness is gradually enhanced, price is still the main factor considered when consumer making purchase decisions. Therefore, price is a sensitive marketing tool for consumer in China.