An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Customer Product Knowledge On Their Brand Attitudes

In similar product selection process, customers are facing a dazzling arrayof brands, together with the limited customer’s own ability, which results thatconsumers are difficult to distinguish each brand differences. In the process ofconsumption, such as demand to confirm, collecting data, evaluation beforepurchase, product knowledge is used as evaluation criteria of selection of aproduct or brand. With the increase of cognition of product, consumersgradually form or change the brand attitude. Therefore, customer productknowledge has a crucial and decisive role on their brand attitude. For enterprises,to better understand the impact of customer product knowledge on the customerbrand attitude, which will contribute to reasonable effectively control relatedattributes of product and brand, and create a unique competitive advantage, andthen win more market share. On the academic values, scholars’ study of productknowledge is ripe, so is brand attitude. But few scholars study the relationshipbetween product knowledge and brand attitude. It is clear that the study ofimpact of customer product knowledge on brand attitude is very important.First this article review related research of product knowledge, and dividingproduct knowledge structure into two dimensions, namely subjective productknowledge and objectivity product knowledge. In addition, this paper introducestwo variables---perceived value and brand trust, through research on the impactof the subjective product knowledge and objective product knowledge on theperceived value and brand trust, then explore the effect of customer productknowledge on brand attitude, and builds a model of customer productknowledge influence on brand attitude. In order to validate the model, this studyuses the means of a questionnaire to collect data, using SPSS17.0and AMOS7.0software tools to process structural equation modeling of the data.Studies show that subjective product knowledge has a positive effect oncustomers’ perception of value and brand trust, and no relationship with brand attitude; objective product knowledge influences customers’ perception of valuepositively and has a negative effects on brand trust instead of positive effect, andno relationship with brand attitude; perceived value is to impact brand trust andbrand attitude positively; brand trust positively impact customer brand attitude.According to the findings of the study, this paper recommends that:(a)strengthening consumers’ product knowledge management in order to increasecustomers’ perceived value;(b) perfecting the construction of enterprisecredibility system in order to improve customers’ brand credibility.