Research On Evaluation And Purchase Intention Of Store Brand Based On Different Thinking Styles

Store brand (Private Label Brand, PLB) shows a dramatic increase in sales volumn in recent years, especially in the Europe and U.S. market, which has been a competitive rival for manufacture brand (National brand). Due to its satisfied performance and competitive price, compared to National Brand, PLB is approaching a broad market, since the critical importance of PLB to retail stores.A big bunch of scholars has embedded in this field and most research papers focus on perceived quality, perceived risk, store image and so on, few scholars have explored store preference as antecedents of PLB evaluation and purchase intention.Some researchers have already proposed "price consciousness" as one important factor of PLB proneness and this study puts forward a new concept-price image consistency between store and PLB-and this antecedent variable may affect the PLB evaluation and purchase intention. Simultaneously, this study introduces thinking style theory-holistic thinking and analytic thinking-as a moderating role of store preference, price-image consistency and PLB evaluation and purchase intention.Focusing on the above issues, the author designed culture priming and situational simulation experiments and recruited70Zhejiang University students as subjects of the this experiment.68pieces of valid questionnaires were finally collected. Then the author employed SPSS to analyze the data to test the research hypotheses. The main conclusions of this study are:(1) Consumers’preference for store will transfer to its PLB products; therefore store preference will positively affect PLB evaluation and purchase intention.(2) In case of middle and low store-price-image, price-image consistency will negatively affect PLB product evaluation while have a positive effect on PLB purchase intention (3) Store preference shows a much positive stronger influence on PLB evaluation and purchase intention for holisitic thinkers than for analytic thinkers (4) Price-image consistency exerts a much stronger influence on PLB evaluation for analytic thinkers than holistic thinkers and this effect is negative in case of low store-price-imge, which means the more price-image consistent, the lower evalution of PLB. However, this effect is not significantly different when researching PLB purchase intention between holistic and analytic thinking.Finally, this paper discusses the hypotheses testing results, and points out its theoretical and practical implications. The disadvantages of the paper and trend of future research are also mentioned.