The Effects Of Global Brand Equity In China: The Mediating Role Of Brand Authenticity

Recently, international academia has paid ever increasing concern on global branding, among which global brand equity is one of the most important topics that need to be explored immediately. Taking six global brands respectively from China and developed countries as study objects, this study selects two specific global brand equity dimensions, perceived quality and global myth, and introduces an innovative construct, brand authenticity, to explore how global brand equity affects consumer attitudes via brand authenticity.261 Chinese consumers were surveyed to provide data for further analysis, during which Structural Equation Modeling method is employed to verify the basic conceptual framework and multi-group analysis is used to differentiate the mediating mechanism between global brands from China and from developed countries.Collectively, this study addresses several key findings. Firstly, perceived quality and global myth directly enhance evaluations on brand authenticity (credibility and symbolism). Meanwhile, these two dimensions of global brand equity positively affect brand purchase likelihood via brand authenticity. Specifically, brand authenticity fully mediates the relationship between perceived quality and brand purchase likelihood, while it acts as a partial mediator in the relationship between global myth and purchase likelihood. In addition, the positive indirect effect that perceived quality poses to purchase likelihood is higher in Chinese global brands, while global myth indirectly affects purchase likelihood more strongly in global brands from developed countries. Finally, to Chinese global brands specifically, global brand equity indirectly increases purchase likelihood only via credibility.These findings make innovative theoretical contributions in interpreting the mechanism on how global brand equity dimensions improve consumer attitudes, which also verifies the reasonableness of the latest definition of brand authenticity and provides important managerial implications to global brands on the effective supervision of global brand equity and the construction of brand authenticity. In general, the communication on such benefit associations as perceived quality and global myth to consumers effectively improve consumer attitudes, during which the targeted connections between different dimensions of global brand equity and brand authenticity facilitate better evaluation on specific authenticity dimensions. Notably, these approaches should be adjusted to global brands with different origins.