Brand Equity and Purchase Intention: The Fashion Market in China

상표자산이 구매의도에 미치는 영향: 중국패션시장에서

Purpose - Global trends play a part to change the structure of the fashion industry. In particular, companies attempting to conduct innovative marketing centering on such products as SPA brands are growing into global companies. SPA stands for "Specialty Store Retailer of Private Label Apparel", meaning its activities are fully integrated from manufacturing through sales, including material procurement design, product, distribution, inventory management, and final sales. For this reason, more understanding of individual corporate profitability is very sensitive to consumer's attitudinal changes. The effects that corporate marketing activities on customer lifetime value through brand attitude were analyzed based on a structural equation model. Rust suggested value equity, brand equity, and relationship equity as customer equity driver. The study examines Chinese consumer because China is the fastest growing fashion market in the world. Research design, data, and methodology - The survey targeted Chinese college student age 20s. Only respondents who had purchased SPA brands in the past year were included for this research. A total of 303, except for 47 missing data of 350 distributed questionnaires were included in this research. The questionnaire is consists of six part to measure value, brand, relationship equity, attitude toward brand, purchase intention and demographic characteristics. This research conducted exploratory factor analysis and reliability test. To verify research hypotheses, structural equation model test was conducted. As for customer equity, diversified models in consideration of the scope of acquisition data, a method of collection of data, influencing factor, and predictability were suggested based on a net present value model. However, the history of customer equity study is relatively short, and sufficient empirical analyses have not been conducted, so more integrated analysis is required. In this study, the concept of driver suggested by Rust was applied to figure out the effects that consumer's attitude has on customer equity. The customer equity driver suggested by them consists of brand equity, value equity, and relationship equity. Results - This study reveals that value equity and brand equity have a positive influence on relationship equity. And, relationship equity has a positive influence on purchase intention through brand attitude. However, value equity and brand equity do not influence on brand attitude. Conclusion - The results of this research generated following implications. First, SPA brands need to take advantage of their value equity such as perceived low price and up-to-date fashion style to attract Chinese young consumer. Second, strong brand equity promises dominants position in the competitive market. As Chinese fashion market grows rapidly, SPA brands can consider branding strategy such as flagship store and celebrity marketing enhancing brand image. Third, the core concept of customer equity strategy is to maintain a relationship with their expecting and existing customers. The relationship equity is built by brand equity and value equity. When SPA brands serves product and service meet with individual customers, customers have intimacy to the brands.