Effects Of Congruency Between Employees' Communication Behavior And Brand Personality On Brand Attitude

Branding leads marketers to add symbolic meaning to goods and services. Marketers, in turn,invest considerable amounts of time and effort in promoting brand image. Traditionally,marketers undertook brand-building through positioning, advertising or promotional campaigns.Yet some brand contacts, such as service contacts between frontline staff and customers, are not in tune with regular brand-positioning strategies. In this study, we will address the key question of how frontline staff can strengthen customers' positive attitude towards brands using service contacts.This research establishes three experiments to explore the effects of the fit between employees' communication behavior and brand personality on customers' brand attitude. In addition, we study the role of information-processing fluency as a mediator as well as the role of product involvement as a moderator.The result of the experiment No.1 is: the fit between employees' communication behavior and brand personality has an interactive effect on brand attitude, and that information-processing fluency plays an partially mediating role. Experiment No.2 once again proves the existence of the information-processing fluency as a mediator., and it reaches a conclusion: when the subjects attribute the fluency to music, the results of experiment No.1 can be replicated. On the other hand, when the subjects attribute the emotion to music, the impact of employee behavior will no longer exists. Through these two experiments, we confirm that the fit between the employee behavior and brand personality has interactive influence on brand attitude, and that information-processing fluency plays an partially mediating role. The result of experiment No.3is: with high level of product involvement, customers will take central routes and focus more on core clues related to products attributes, so that the fit between employees and brand rarely affect their brand attitude. In contrast, with low product involvement, customers will take peripheral routes and judge the products by peripheral clues, so that they will pay more attention to employee behavior. In this way, when employee behavior matches brand personality, processing fluency of customers will be higher, and their attitude towards the brand will be more positive.