The Superiority And Mechanism Of The Impact On Brand Attachment Coming From The Brand Story

As competition intensifies, the Times that relying on the conventional advertising can createextraordinary brand and make great profit has become the past, whether the customer can feel thedistinct personality and core value of a brand is the key for successful brand marketing. Researchshows that, as a special marketing method, the brand story(brand narrative) is the soul of brandconstruction, which can let customers feel the core value of the brand through it’s deep emotionalcommunication. However, the brand story in domestic research is still in it’s early stage, thus itlacks the corresponding empirical researches. Therefore, in study1, this paper verified that,compared to the traditional advertising (brand introduction), there is a significant superiority of theimpact on brand attachment coming from the brand story.To an enterprise, a brand has its own story is not that difficult, but how to tell the good ones iswhat is does matters. The former researches said that, after reading a brand story, the consumerswould make an extra comparation between the self-concept and brand image, and then come to theconclusion: whether it met his/her self-congruity need. What the self-congruity theory and currentempirical researches proved was that, it is only when the brand image meets the demand of theconsumers’ self-congruity need, that it can arouse their emotion and attachment to the brand itself.Therefore, in study2, this paper explored the mediating effect of self-congruity between brandstory and brand attachment.Study3was proposed to examine the mechanism of the effect on the brand attachmentcoming from brand story, by way of model construction which made the machanism more microand deepen. Study3made the different types of self-congruity unfolded, the different dimensionsof the brand attachment unfolded, in order to construct the model among the different types of self-congruity, the brand story and the three different dimensions of the brand attachment. Through thepath analysis, the expected model was inspected and modificated, and at last we got the best fittingmodel(M3), which provided it’s strategic significance for the enterprises’ marketing thinking.The following conclusions could be drawn from our studies: 1: Compared with brand introduction, brand story gets a significant superiority of the effect onthe brand attachment, which has different effect sizes on the three dimensions of brand attachment.2: The brand story has its impact on brand attachment, through the complete mediating effectof self-congruity.3: The brand story has its impact on association dimension, through the complete mediatingeffect of the true-private self-congruity, the true-social self-congruity, and the ideal-private self-congruity; the brand story has its impact on emotion dimension, through the complete mediatingeffect of the true-social self-congruity, and the ideal-social self-congruity; the brand story has itsimpact on commitment dimension, through the complete mediating effect of the true-private self-congruity.4: The size of the mediating effects coming from four types of self-congruity is quite different:they in turn decrease from the true-private self-congruity, the true-social self-congruity, the ideal-social self-congruity, and finally to the ideal-private self-congruity.