Exploring The Realtiongship Between Retailers' Store Image?advertising Spending And Customers'willingness To Pay A Price Premium For Private Brand

With the rapid development of Retail formats,private brands becomes one of the most important strategies of retails for implement differentiation and improving the bargaining power to manufacturers.In addition,to Shape a better corporate image and increase profit with attracting high-end customers,retails are devoting themselves to building top-end private brands to change the brand positioning from the former image as "low quality,low price",for example,Sam's Choice series of Walmart,and Watson Water series of Watson.Characterized by good quality and a higher price over other mainstream brands,the development of private brands in China is lagging behind,a great amount of customers' private brands awareness is relatively fixed as "low quality,low price",so We are conducting research to figure out how to reduce the gap of perceived quality bet.ween high-end private brands and first-line manufacturer brands through marketing activities,and whether or not customers' willingness to pay a price premium for products of high-end private brands will increase when the gap of perceived quality between high-end private brands and first-line manufacturer brands reduce.We consider these topic with vital practical and research significance.On the basis of literature review and theoretical derivation,the conceptual model is built with store image and advertising spending as the independent variables,the gap of perceived quality as mediator variable,willingness to pay a price premium for private brand as dependent variable,customer knowledge as moderators.The questionnaire is designed with mature scales to measure all the variables in the conceptual model.Through online and offline questionnaire survey,this study collects the data of 209 samples.The experimental results show that store image and advertising spending will negatively affect the gap of perceived quality between private brands and manufacturer brands,the gap of perceived quality between private brands and manufacturer brands will negatively affect customers' willingness to pay a price premium for products of high-end private brands.Then,customer knowledge moderates the relationship between store image or advertising spending and the gap of perceived quality between private brands and manufacturer brands.And this study finds the interaction effect of store image and advertising spending.Several important marketing suggestions for the development of retailers' private brands are proposed at the end of the article.Limitations of the study are also listed,with corresponding future directions in this area.