Involvement And Brand Switching:perceptive Value And Perceived Risk As Intermediate Factor

Accompanying with the economic globalization, an increasing number of international products crowd into domestic market, which causes more furious competition. Consumer is an important element of market, whose choice for products forces enterprises to focus more on the competition of consumers rather than products. Brand switching is a way to raise the sale or market share of a particular product brand ( Ganesh,2000). Therefore it's practical to do research on the consumers'motivation and the factors of brand switching.The existing studies do not concern much about empirical research on brand switching, especially research on influencial factors from the angle of involvement. The thesis mainly studies brand switching from the aspects of perceived value,perceived risk and involvement level. And suppose perceptive value and perceived risk as intermediate factor to build the study model. Based on extensive literature review, the study divides perceived value into two dimensions of perceived emotional value, perceived quality value, and it also divides perceived risk into four dimensions of time and money risk, self-loss risk, perceived function risk, opportunity cost risk. In the end, choosing portable computer industry as a research object, the thesis tries to study the influential factors of different consumers'brand switching behavior through 500 random questionnaires from consumers that have ever used at least two brands of portable computers. These samples fit the study well, and the questionnaires also have good reliability and validity.The data collected from the 500 questionnaires is processed by SPSS software in this research. The statistical analysis methods adopted by this paper include descriptive statistics analysis, reliability and validity analysis, exploratory factor analysis, t-test analysis, single factor analysis of variance, correlation analysis and linear regression analysis. On the basis of data processing, this paper makes inspection to the research, and also reaches to some conclusions:1. As for portable computers, the perceptive value is positively correlated to brand switching, while the perceived risk is negatively related to brand switching. As for the two dimensions of perceptive value, consumers are more concerned about emotional value the brand brings to them. In the respect of perceived risk, self-loss risk, perceptive functional risk and opportunity cost risk make more significant influences to brand switching. Through further analysis, we reach to the conclusion that consumers are more concerned about the perceived risk rather than the perceptive value that a new brand brings to them.2. The level of involvement is respectively positively and negatively correlated to consumer's perceptive value and perceived risk, through which it makes influences to brand switching. Therefore, perceptive value and perceived risk play an intermediary role in the influence that the level of involvement makes to brand switching.Based on the conclusion above, this study puts forward some practical and meaningful suggestions to portable computer suppliers for hope that they can better understand the demand of the consumers and make more proper marketing strategies.