Global Brand Purchase Likelihood: A Critical Synthesis and an Integrated Conceptual Framework
Published 12/1/2008
Author: Ayşegül Özsomer and Selin Altaras
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Executive Summary
Global brands exert their power and influence within various cultural, psychological, and economic domains. Özsomer and Altaras define global brands as those that have widespread regional/global awareness, availability, acceptance, and demand and are often found under the same name with consistent positioning, personality, look, and feel in major markets enabled by centrally coordinated marketing strategies and programs. Inspired by this definition, the authors build a model of the drivers of global brand attitude and purchase likelihood comprised of constructs from three consumer behavior research streams: consumer culture theory, signaling theory, and the associative network memory model.
The authors first review the existing literature on global branding, addressing the following three questions: Why do consumers prefer global brands? Who is more likely to prefer global brands? and Which product categories are likely to benefit from perceived brand globalness? Then, the authors introduce global brand authenticity, cultural capital, and perceived brand globalness as constructs deriving mainly from consumer culture theory and global brand credibility as a construct borrowed from signaling theory. They also include global brand quality, social responsibility, prestige, and relative price as brand associations, constructs deriving mainly from the associative network memory model. These constructs have direct and indirect effects on global brand attitude and global brand purchase likelihood, reflecting the three-dimensional belief–attitude–behavior model in consumer behavior.
From a global brand manager’s perspective, Özsomer and Altaras’s study provides valuable insights into potential positioning strategies. The authors propose that communicating the globalness of a brand is not the ultimate way to create superiority over other brands. Perceptions of the global brand also may create positive brand associations, possibly leading to brand preference. Therefore, positioning on cultural capital and authenticity is a credible route to purchase likelihood.
The authors also identify self-construal and cosmopolitanism as two characteristics that influence consumers’ evaluations of global brands, suggesting that global marketing managers should employ targeted communication strategies. In a market characterized by many consumers who rate high on the independent self-construal, communicating the cultural capital of the brand may be an effective strategy. Cosmopolitan consumers are an important target segment for global brand managers because they have a greater tendency to consume goods perceived as having high levels of cultural capital and authenticity.
Biography
Ayşegül Özsomer is an associate professor of marketing at Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey. Her research focuses on global marketing strategy with a particular emphasis on standardization-adaptation issues and performance implications, market orientation, and global brand management. She has published in leading scholarly journals, including Journal of Marketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of International Marketing, and International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management. She has served on the editorial board of Journal of International Marketing and Advances in International Marketing. She is also a frequent reviewer for other journals including Journal of International Business Studies and International Journal of Research in Marketing.
Selin Altaras has a B.A. in Business Administration from Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey. In 2006, she completed her M.B.A. at Bogaziçi University. Since August 2007, she has been working at Taylor Nelson Sofres in Piar, Turkey as a research executive, conducting research mainly in the fast moving consumer goods sector.
J International Marketing, Volume 16, Number 4, December 2008
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