国家、公司和产品品牌形象对消费者态度与购买倾向的作用机制——基于运动品牌的数据

The Impact of Country Brand Image,Corporate Brand Image,and Product Brand Image on Consumer's Attitude and Purchase Intention——Base on the Data of Sports Brand

本文旨在研究品牌形象对消费者态度和购买倾向的作用机制,评估了国家品牌形象、公司品牌形象和产品品牌形象三者之间的关系,构建了一个以此三者为自变量,以消费者态度和购买倾向为因变量的模型。通过在线调研,以来自于美、德、日、意、中的运动品牌为测试对象,面向中国消费者对模型进行了检验。通过回归分析,研究发现,公司品牌形象和产品品牌形象对消费者态度和购买倾向有显著的正向影响,国家品牌形象对消费者态度的直接影响不显著;国家品牌形象和公司品牌形象对产品品牌形象有显著的正向影响。通过使用单因素方差分析,研究发现,五个品牌形象的优劣排序依次为:阿迪达斯、耐克、李宁、卡帕、美津浓。这些结论为品牌形象的进一步研究提供了理论基础,并对打造中国国际知名品牌具有指导意义。

Brand image is one of the top priorities multi-national enterprises （MNEs） have to pay special attention to when they operate internationally. Researchers and managers used to focus only on the brand image of products, which actually is far from enough if the MNEs are to establish their brands in the international market. Three reasons contribute to this argument： First, among the economic globalization, it is difficult to separate international brands from their country-of-origin （COO）. Thus, the brand image of COO has great influence on the MNEs and their brands. Second, the acceleration of products upgrades makes it unsustainable to support the company by some key product brand. Building up a strong corporate brand is the path we cannot surpass. Third, product brand image is still one of the factors that most influence consumers＇ choice. The quality, price and design of products are the basic consumer perception to a specific brand. And the brand image of low-quality has been the headache for Chinese companies. Due to the above reasons, researches on corporate brand image and country brand image have to be taken against the background of corporate and country development strategy. And our researches should also focus on how the brand images of product, corporate and country are interlinked. In the Chinese MNEs, the brand image of country, corporate and product are same important for building world famous brands. However, academic researches are insufficient. First, researches clustered on country brand and product brand, but scattered on corporate brand. The few researches on corporate band are mostly exploratory instead of empirical. And researches on models integrate these three concepts from different levels are extremely rare. It is thus impossible to comprehensively explain the theoretical problems of brand image. Second, researchers incline to focus on the brands of developed countries rather than those from developing countries. The booming economy and prominent market in developing countries are now attracting researchers＇ attention. Due to the difference between the market of developing countries and the mature western market, we cannot apply the previous research methods on the mature markets to emerging markets without adjustment and adaption. Otherwise, it will leads to large deviation of the research results. To improve the limitation of previous researches, the present study aims to investigate the relationships among the brand image of country, corporate and product and their impacts on consumers＇ attitudes and purchase intentions. A model is developed to incorporate all these variables and evaluate their correlations. In order to test the model, an online survey on Chinese consumers was conducted to examine their attitudes and purchase intentions to five sports brands which come from the United States （Nike） , Germany （Adidas） , Japan （Mizuno） , Italy （Kappa）, and China （Li-Ning）. The study used real consumers as research objects, covered brands from both developed countries and developing countries, and gave direct comparisons of these brands＇ image. As a consequence, the results have more validity and are more instructive for developing world famous brands in developing countries. The results of regression analysis shows that the brand image of corporate and product both have significant positive impact on consumer＇s attitude and purchase intention but the brand image of country has no direct influence on consumer＇s attitude. Furthermore, the brand image of country and corporate both positively relates to the brand image of product. We also compared the brand images of the five sports brands by using One-Way ANOVA analysis. From best to worst they are： Adidas, Nike, Li-Ning, Kappa and Mizuno. Inconsistent with the hypothesis, the direct impact of country brand image on consumer＇s attitude is not significant which has three probable explanations. First of all, prior studies have shown that multiple-clue approach will lead to the decreasing effect of the influencing factor comparing to single-clue approach. Second, the impact of country brand image on consumer＇s attitude may be diverse according to different product categories. Last, consumer characteristics may moderate the impact of country brand image on consumer＇s attitude. The present research enriches the theory of brand image and provides some managerial instructions for the brand management of MNEs. The empirical analysis demonstrated that country brand image and corporate brand image may also influence consumers＇ attitude and play an important role in global market. Therefore, the MNEs should not only emphasize on particular product brand but also manage to built strong corporate brand and corporate with industry association and the government to improve the county brand image.