The Mediating Effect Of Consumer Trust On Brand Equity

Brand equity reflects the overall image of the enterprise and is the importantsource of forming the core competitiveness of the enterprise. The center of enterprises’marketing strategies has turned to the management and escalation of their brandequity, therefore, brand equity has become one of the most popular issues in today’smarketing research field.Consumer trust is the prerequisite for the survival of enterprises as well as thefoundation for enterprises to obtain their sustainable competitive advantages.Although the products and services provided by the enterprise could be imitated by itscompetitors, it is the trust from consumers that can never be copied. Thus enterprisesshould center on their consumers when making strategic decisions.This paper is built upon researches from previous relative literatures and thestudy was conducted from the consumers’ perspective. In this paper, consumer trust isconsidered as the mediating variable which is introduced to the relationship betweenbrand attributes and brand equity, the relationship between salespersons attributes andbrand equity, and the relationship between industry regulation and brand equity. Thenthe research model of the mediating effect of consumer trust on brand equity isconstructed and corresponding hypotheses are put forward. Studying the mediatingeffect of consumer trust on brand equity from the perspective of consumers has someimportant implications for enterprises to make marketing designs or to developmarketing activities so that their brand equity could be established and enhanced.This paper uses the cosmetics industry as the research background, which is one of the most rapidly-developing and potential markets in China. The study refers to themeasurement scales of brand equity and consumer trust from scholars both at homeand abroad, and designs a questionnaire survey based on the research model. Thesample data was collected in cities of Shanghai, Hangzhou and Wuhan and processedby SPSS12.0and EViews5.0. This paper achieves the following result by carrying onreliability analysis, validity analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis:The mediating effect of consumer trust on the relationship between brandattributes and brand equity, and the relationship between salespersons attributes andbrand equity are all significant. However, consumer trust plays a complete mediatingrole in the relationship between industry regulation and brand equity, which meansthat the influence of industry regulation on brand equity is determined completely byconsumer trust.