The Study On The Effect Of Corporate Associations, Face Consciousness On Willingness To Pay For Premium Private Brand

With the acceleration of competition, developing private brand has become one of the important means of competition of retailers to build store loyalty and enhance the bargaining power to manufacturers. In addition, in order to avoid the homogeneity competition, implement differentiation and enhance profit margins of private brand, retailers’private brand development strategy has changed from "price-center" to "quality-center". They are starting to develop premium private brand, such as Sam’s Choice of Wal-Mart, Watsons water series of Watson and so on. In the development process, retailers also notice that the relationship between corporate associations and consumers’ purchase intention. In order to raise consumers’ perception to the overall retailer and evaluation to private brand, retailers improve their corporate ability and actively fulfill the corporate social responsibility. Due to corporate brand’s endorsement, premium private brand gradually changed the past "low-quality, low-cost" negative image. More and more consumers understand the premium private brand’s characteristic of "high-quality and high-price". However, private brand starts late in domestic market. Consumers’ cognitive degree of private brand is low, which restricts the development of premium private brand. Whether premium private brand can get consumers’ trust and favor determines success or failure. It is also a critical issue for retailers. Therefore, as an enterprise strategic asset, corporate associations has become more and more important for retailers. At the same time, consumers face consciousness, as a unique and important part of Chinese culture, also plays an important role in the process of purchasing private labels.Based on consumers of private brand, this study discusses the impact of corporate associations and face consciousness on willingness to pay for premium private brand. Based on carding domestic and foreign literature, and draw lessons from existing research results, the conceptual model is built with corporate associations as the independent variable, private brand trust as mediator variable, willingness to pay for premium private brand as dependent variable, face consciousness as moderators. Through the field survey and the network questionnaire survey platform, this study collects the date of 337 samples and uses AMOS21.0 and SPSS19.0 software to do empirical test. The experimental results show that corporate associations has significant positive effect on private brand trust; corporate social responsibility can directly affect willingness to pay for premium private brand, but also through private brand trust can indirectly influence on it; corporate ability has not significant effect on willingness to pay for premium private brand. In addition, private brand trust can significantly enhance willingness to pay for premium private brand. Then, face consciousness moderates the relationship above. On the one hand, the conclusions in this paper enrich the literature of private brand research’s foundation theory. Many existing related researches have been established in western countries, and often studied on standard or economical private labels. Under the background of Chinese culture and market environment, based on premium private brand, this paper focuses on the impact of corporate associations and face conscious on willingness to pay for premium private brand together and reveals the path and mechanism of affect, which bring us new perspectives and knowledge. On the other hand, the conclusions of this paper also provide certain valuable management suggestions for retailers. Retailers should fully recognize and understand the crucial effect of corporate associations and face consciousness on the process of consumers to buy their private brand. The managers of retailers should effort to establish the positive corporate associations and strengthen the propaganda, so as to build differentiated competitive advantage depending on premium private brand.However, the researches in this paper also have certain limitations. Firstly, although the subject in the study covers many retailers, they are mainly large and well-known ones, so the sample does not have totally representativeness. Secondly, there is a certain difference between purchase intention and actual purchase behavior of consumers. It is necessary to further analyze the relationship between them. Lastly, we still need to include other variables in research scope, to improve the research model so as to reach more accurate and systematic conclusions.