Exploring_How_Brand_Image_Influences_Consumer_Behavior_in_Making_a_Brand_Choice__a_Case_Study_on_Apple_Iphone.

1 Introduction Brand name recognition makes all the difference among the existing companies in any marketplace. Brand value is the primary factor in bringing additional value to a service or a product and also to its provider or manufacturer (Yang, 2005). Apple is a new entrant in the Interbrand’s top 10 global brands list in 2011, and is a growing brand name to consumers all around the world. This brand is developing and strengthening their brand value at an extremely high speed, which is 58% more in 2011 than the previous year. With their famous slogan of ‘Think different’, it is assumed that Apple has enabled the individuals to be open and creative while using user friendly gadgets introduced by the firm. However, the research focus in this study has been on iPhone, one of the most popular product introduced by Apple (Abimbola, 2010). When it comes to the consumers’ decision making while purchasing a specific product, it is the ability of the consumers’ cognitive response in differentiating a specific brand that drives the overall decision making process (Yang, 2005). The purpose of this study is to determine how consumer’s buying behavior in selecting iPhone as a product has been shaped up by the brand image communicated by Apple. This research will focus on studying consumers’ reaction and perception studies based on selected questionnaires. The research also includes a brief study of the existing literature related to the question of the research. 2 Literature Review The earlier academic studies conducted on marketing had been focused primarily on three different school of thoughts around marketing that were the commodities, the institutions bringing the products to the market and the functions performed by those institutions to bring the commodities from place of production to market (Webster, 1992). The managerial orientation of marketing had been started to be considered by the academicians during the 1950s and 1960. A number of authors like Kotler (1967), Howard (1957), McCarthy (1960) have defined marketing management as a process to make decisions and solve problems in order to gain control over the competitive market place. After the 1980s, a new logic started to emerge describing marketing as a whole set of tasks consisting quality management, value chain management, supply chain management, management of available resources and analysis of network (Lusch and Vargo, 2004). In this new paradigm, the customer is considered as a co-producer and resources are considered as primary (Lusch and Vargo, 2004). Figure 1: From goods oriented marketing towards Service Oriented marketing Source: Adopted from (Lusch and Vargo, 2004). 2.1.1 Customers emerging as the centre point of Marketing Sheth, Siodia and Sharma (2000) have pointed out this service centred view of marketing as a customer centric and market driven process. This customer centricity not only meant being customer oriented, it rather reflected marketing to be a process of collaboration which incorporates learning from the consumers and reacting or pro-acting based on consumers’ needs that are primarily dynamic in nature (Lusch and Vargo, 2004). Haeckel (1999) made an observation that the companies that had been successful had moved their focus towards a ‘’sense and response strategy’’ (Day, 1999, p. 70) from the traditional ‘’make and sell strategy’’. 2.1.2 Branding – a method for Bridging the corporation and the consumers: Since, the evolution of marketing had made a new paradigm that is consumer oriented, it is necessary for the corporation to make a bridge with the consumers and create a differentiated image among the consumers about their products. Here, the author critically explores how branding can act as the bridge between the corporation and the consumers. Kotler (1994, p. 444) defined brand as “A brand is a name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of the competitors.’’. According to Davis (2000), brand is an intangible asset, yet extremely crucial to establish a company’s unique identity. He also states that brand is fundamentally defined by consumers’ hopes and expectations and it lives on by being consistent over time; all the strong brands have a strong impact on the consumer’s mind and can create a similar image to all the consumers whenever the brand name is mentioned to them. Strong brands have products that can deliver better functionalities and benefits while excelling in quality. However, the strength of a brand is not achieved only by possessing better functionalities than others, rather it mostly lies in the underlying psychology and response of the consumers (Yang, 2005). Customers’ perceptions about brands are usually superficial and are related to only a few selected attributes of the associated products or services (Arnold, 1992). In most cases, customers are only focused on the benefits they derive from a product or a service. The most interesting issue is that customer’s perception is created at their subconscious level which makes the whole customer brand relationship a truly complex one (Arnold, 1992). However, a brand should be able to deliver specific and first of its kind benefits to the customers, should continue satisfying the customers, add intangible benefits, maintain the brand persona and above all deliver such benefits that the customers actually desire for (Arnold, 1992). Aaker, David and Joachimsthaler (1996a, p. 68), defines brand identity such that it “provides direction, purpose and meaning for the brand.” He explains brand identity as a distinctive set of associated specialties that the strategy maker of the brand wants to develop and maintain. Those specialties represent the brand and provide commitments to the customers. Brand identity engages the brand with the customers through emotional and functional benefits. 2.1.3 Consumer response to branding and change in consumer’s buying behaviour The academic study of consumer behaviour leading to a brand selection is relatively new and is changing constantly. Many other disciplines are changing this particular field in multidimensional ways (Solomon, 2009). ‘’ In order to proceed with a transaction, consumers must search for information and monitor the ongoing process to ensure a favourable deal.’’ (Teo et. Al., 2004, p.452). It has been found in consumer research that a powerful brand has the power to create significant image in consumers’ minds. (Keller, 1993) & (Shocker et.al, 1994). The reason why marketers emphasizes on developing a brand image is because this process develops product differentiation and influence the consumers buying behaviour in a positive way (Shocker et.al, 1994). Branding is not only associated to consumers, but also to the marketers. According to consumers’ perceptions, a brand has functional and emotional attributes and is also self expressive (Aaker, 1991& 1996). A brand and the consumers are related to each other based on the consumers’ perceptions of self actualization and the development of brand loyalty among them based on repetitive usage of product (Watkins, 1986). How this relationship between consumers and brand selection works and how their perceptions and ideas are accumulated towards a specific choice is shown in the next figure: Figure 2: Customers’ choice model Source: (Watkins, 1986) 2.2 Apple as a Brand Apple started their journey in 1977 with Macintosh, a prototype computer built to add comfort to the users and make the computing user friendly as they gradually developed Graphic User Interface and mouse and made them commercially available for the market. (O’Grady, 2008). A small company that was inaugurated in a garage has been able to create a whole new market for portable entertainment with their metamorphic ideas. The building up of Apple’s success has been slow, yet steady and the growth revived in 1997 after the return of Steve Jobs, one of the two founders of Apple. (O’Grady, 2008). And this return has been proves successful with two revolutionary next generation consumer electronics namely the ‘iPod’ and ‘iPhone’. These two new devices have surged Apple with such a power that the old Apple Computer has rebranded with the name Apple Inc (O’Grady, 2008). This product iPhone is considered to be a cult product that was way ahead of all other mobile devices that were available in the market when it was first introduced (Konstantopoulos & Sakas, 2009). Adding personalization and a resurgence of the consumers’ self concept have been the key forces in iPhone branding. ‘’there is an app for about anything’’- this popular line from Apple advertisement has been one of the key motivation for the Apple user to make them feel the owner of a super management tool that represents their ideal social self that is able to do anything (Kapferer, 2008). 2.3 Rationale for the research: This study will provide an insight for any existing or new Apple like entrants in the market to learn how to develop a successful brand like Apple, and without understanding how the consumers actually think and react- this knowledge is unreachable. Besides, this research will also enrich the existing literature through empirical analysis of a few brand image development models. 3 Aims and Objectives Aim The aim of this research is to critically explore what brand image has been developed in consumers’ perceptions through Apple’s brand communication regarding the iPhone product and how this process has affected consumer behaviour, particularly in making the brand choice and purchase decision. Objectives The overarching aim of this study is to critically explore the impact of brand marketing of Apple products on consumer behaviour. To achieve this aim, the following objectives have been established: • To critically review relevant research and theory based literature on the relationship between brand marketing strategy and consumer behavior. • To adopt a case study approach and use a questionnaire survey to determine how consumers’ decisions to purchase Apple products (iPhone) are influenced by their brand marketing strategy and brand image. • To analyse the adopted case study and questionnaire data and compare these with previous literature. • To provide conclusions and recommendations on effective branding strategy that marketing managers and new market entrants can adopt to strengthen their brand image. 3.1 Research Question A research question is very important as this determines the scope of the research and the domain of information the researcher needs to explore (Dilon et. al., 1990). To be able to fulfill the objectives of this research, the research questions here were: “How does Apple’s brand image influence the consumers’ buying behaviour' How does of the consumers select iPhone as a consumable' How does the analysis and findings help the branding community'” In order to find an answer to the research question, a well defined research design in required and the development of the research design is discussed in the following section. A brief introduction to the data analysis method of the collected data is also discussed in the later sections of this chapter. 4 Research Design: 4.1 Research Philosophy The classical research philosophies used in research design are either positivism or phenomenology based. While positivism emphasizes more on the measurement of existing physical phenomena, Phenomenology is very much concerned about human experience and considers this as a major source of data (Husserl, 1980). In this research, the researcher will take a soft phenomenology point of view as domain of study would be the consumers’ experience in regard to iPhone usage. 4.2 Research Approach Deductive research is derived from positivist research philosophy whereas inductive research has been derived from phenomenology or interpretation based paradigm (Crowther and Lancaster 2009). The inductive approach to research method is comparatively flexible as the researcher is not bound by any pre determined hypothesis (Mertens 2008). The research approach taken here is inductive as there is no predefined hypothesis to follow in this study. 4.3 Research Methods Quantitative research is systematic experimental investigation through statistical, mathematical or computational analysis (Berry, 2005).The main objective of quantitative research is to develop and execute mathematical models, theories and hypotheses related to the specific research analysis (Mason, 1994). And qualitative research is based upon those findings which cannot be achieved by any statistical or any type of quantitative research (Ospina, 2009). However, methods that apply during qualitative research are based upon interviewing, observation, ethnography, observation of the participant and focus groups. The main goal of qualitative research is to understand from the sample studied rather than trying to generalize from the population’s sample (Ospina, 2009). Neither of the quantitative or qualitative research method is therefore sufficient on its own for understanding a research problem to its full extent. A mixed method (Tashakkori and Teddlie, 2003) research design is a procedure through which a researcher can collect, analyze and amalgamate both quantitative and qualitative data in a single research study and this process helps the researcher to gain a better understanding of the complete research problem (Creswell, 2002) for a complex issue (Green, Caracelli, and Graham, 1989) like studying the impact of brand image on consumers’ buying behavior. In this study, the mixed method research design consisted of two major phases, where • The first phase will collect text data through focus group discussion for the exploration of the research domain and the preparation of the questionnaire to present to the survey participants. A focus group is a qualitative research method that is used by both social and market researchers (Morgan, 1988). According to Powell et. al. (1996), a focus group is a group of individuals selected by the researchers to provide individual and collective opinions on the research topic. Focus groups are usually used at the primary study stages (Kreuger 1988) in order to develop a particular activity set (Race et al 1994) so that the further research avenue can be generated. • In the second phase, both quantitative and qualitative data will be collected using an online survey in order to identify the relationship between the selected variables. 4.4 Survey Research Sampling Of the many available survey sampling techniques, Stratified sampling is assumed to be the better choice for this specific research survey as this sampling method has much less sampling errors than the usual random sampling method (Neyman, 1934). In order to select the stratified samples, the researcher needs to find a stratum of a larger population that has at least one common characteristic. In this research case, the set of people owning or willing to own an iPhone will be the stratum to help the researcher in identifying what impact the brand image of iPhone had over them and why they had chosen this specific product. 4.5 Data Analysis: Data analysis is a tool that helps to find out and state facts, identify patterns, build rationalization and test hypotheses (Levine, 1996). This tool basically transforms random instances into meaningful data by developing a correlation among them (Levine, 1996). In this survey, a statistics based data analysis pattern will be used to generate the analysis report and further interpretation will be done based on the understanding and the analytical ability of the researcher. 5 Reliability, Limitations and Risks This study can be limited in a sense that the survey designed to study the consumers responses can turn out to be misguiding and might not be able to answers the questions required for the research. Besides, the sample size picked on a random basis does not always guarantee a true picture unless the sample size is quite large. Because of time limitations, if the researcher’s is unable to communicate with a large group; a large sample cannot be dealt with within this time frame. Especially in this case, the selection of sample size will be even more difficult due to the use of a stratified sampling technique. This technique limits the number of samples to be taken. Another risk is that the consumers might not be attentive enough while participating in the survey. Again, while constructing the focus group discussion the observer’s point of view might lead towards a biased understanding of the collected data. All these limitations might alter the original direction of the research. To prevent this orientation shift the researcher plans to engage as interactively as possible with the interviewees and the survey participants, and the primary stratum selection was made on a wider range of population to be able to find the sufficient sample size for the study. Moreover a strict schedule is needed to be maintained for the research so that the time limitation could be overcome. 6 Task plan and schedule Task Brief Expected Timeline Focused group discussion 20/11/2011 Questionnaire preparation 24/10/2011 Survey Distribution and Data Collection 05/12/2011 Data Analysis and Presentation 12/12/2011 Report Writing 20/12/2011 Report Submission 23/12/2011 7 References Aaker, D.A. (1991), Managing Brand Equity: Capitalizing on the Value of a Brand Name, The Free Press, New York, NY. Aaker, D.A. (1996a), Building Strong Brands, The Free Press, New York, NY. Aaker, D.A. 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