The Influence of Consumer Motivation on Satisfaction in the Field of Co-branding - Take Food Brands for Example

. Following the development of co-branding and the emergence of the co-branded product boom, many consumers are choosing to buy their favorite co-branded products. Among them, co-branded food products occupy a large share of the market. However, the rapid development of co-branded products has also given rise to many problems, such as the mismatched positioning of the two co-branded enterprises and the poor quality of their products, all of which seriously affect consumers' purchase motivation and satisfaction as well as the development of the co-branded enterprises. Against this background, this paper presents a quantitative analysis of consumer motivation, purchasing psychology and satisfaction, and reviews three aspects of co-branded food purchasing motivation, satisfaction analysis, and ways to improve consumer satisfaction. This paper reflects the research findings in this field, the reality and the problems to be addressed. Taking co-branded food products as an example, this paper analyzes the relevant factors affecting consumer motivation and satisfaction of co-branded food products by studying theories related to co-branding model, consumer motivation and satisfaction, and combining the results of questionnaire research with relevant theories and charts. It also proposes systematic suggestions for raising consumer motivation and satisfaction to help enterprises stand out in the face of fierce competition.


Background
In recent years, thanks to the advancement of market economy and network technology, all kinds of enterprises in China have developed rapidly and people's living standard has also been improved.People's demand for food is gradually changing from satiety to deliciousness, from simple physiological needs to more psychological factors to influence consumption.Enterprises introduce co-branding not only to meet the needs of their customers, but also to stand out in today's highly competitive market economy.Western scholars conducted massive research on co-branding in the early 1990s, while in China, co-branding as a very popular marketing model has only received widespread attention in recent years.Of the many brands, the co-branding of HEYTEA, Wu Fang Zhai, Forbidden City National Tide has left a strong impression on us, and the rise of such cross-border co-branded products has allowed merchants to reap the capital and heat.But behind the co-branding, it is the merchants who take advantage of consumer psychology to facilitate the transaction, thus achieving the enhancement of corporate brand equity.Few enterprises consider consumer satisfaction as the most important factor, which is why consumer reviews of cobranded food products on the Internet are mixed.In this paper, we will explore the reasons of consumers' purchasing co-branded products and the comparison of consumers' satisfaction before and after purchasing cobranded products from the perspective of the motivation of consumer behavior and consumer satisfaction, and make our own views on future consumers' consumption of co-branded products.

Co-branding and co-branded products
Co-branding is an important way to leverage brand equity.For the initiator, it is expected to use the influence, audience base, and assets of the other party, by virtue of co-branding, to market the mass consumer's willingness to buy the new product and the public opinion climate, and to enhance the initiator's brand image and brand identity through co-branded products.Academics are still divided on the definition of cobranding after a long period of research.For example, Grossman [1] argues that any marketing behavior that binds two brands together (e.g., advertising, product, product display, and distribution) can be called cobranding; According to Rao and Ruekert [2]88, cobranding refers to the short-term or long-term association and combination of two or more independent brands, products or other proprietary assets.
Co-branded products are new products jointly produced by two or more brands.Recently, domestic cobranded food products continue to emerge, roughly divided into three forms of co-branding: the first is the co-branding between brands, the second is the cobranding between brands and IP, and the third is the cooperation between brands and people.Co-branding in recent years is gradually involving more traditional enterprises and traditional culture, many of which has received good feedback from consumers, such as the cobranded products of Oreo and the Palace Museum, and the co-branded products of White Rabbit and Scent Library, all reflecting the fact that co-branded products can, to a certain extent, inspire our traditional culture and traditional enterprises to realize new development and a perfect combination of tradition and new trends.However, some co-branded products did not get good feedback and even played some reverse role, for example, the co-branding of HEYTEA and Durex was not welcomed by the public because the two brands were positioned in two completely different fields, which not only failed to bring better economic benefits to the two enterprises, but also made the public have serious doubts about their brand positioning.Therefore, only the right co-branding can contribute to the enterprise's growth.In this process, the consumer's evaluation of the product significantly determines the enterprise's success or failure in co-branding.As a result, the necessary condition for inter-enterprise co-branding is the creation of a quality co-branded product with consumer satisfaction.

Consumer psychology and consumer behavior
Consumer psychology refers to a series of psychological activities that occur in the whole process of purchasing behavior, which is consumers' comprehensive reaction to objective consuming objects and their own subjective consumption needs.According to the sequence of its occurrence, psychologists summarize it into three aspects: cognitive process (sensation, perception, memory, thinking, imagination), emotional process and volitional process.[3] Consumer psychology is a decision-making process of consumer purchase from the cognitive process through the emotional process to the volitional process, which is often called consumer's "black tank" [4] because no one can know about it except the consumer himself.Although consumers' decisionmaking process is not known to others, their consumer behavior is known by their external behavior.Various psychological and individual factors will stimulate consumer behavior at the moment of purchase.Psychological and individual factors are the main factors influencing consumer behavior.Psychological factors are the mental activities, emotional perceptions, and product perceptions that take place between the consumer's desire to buy and the consumer's action to buy, while individual factors refer to personal income, gender, age, external stimuli, and other factors.Many consumers will have the desire to buy products because of external stimuli or stimuli of a certain group of people.
Consumers of co-branded food products are also stimulated by psychological or individual factors, and even by the external environment, which is an important reason for consumers to buy co-branded products.Hence, studying consumer psychology when consumers buy co-branded products also helps us to study the influence of consumer psychology on consumer satisfaction.

Consumer satisfaction
Consumer satisfaction has gradually come to the attention of the public in recent years.In the concern index analysis of the CNKI, the concern index of consumer satisfaction has annually increased, up to 132 in 2018, which essentially reflects that the consumer awareness of the public is changing from satisfying physiological needs to satisfying more aspects of needs.
Customer satisfaction is that the degree of customer satisfaction with the product or service can be measured by the difference between the expected utility and the actual experience after use: if the actual experience is consistent with or better than their expectations, customers will be satisfied; on the contrary, if the actual experience is lower than their previous expectations, customers will be dissatisfied.
After such a mental comparison process, it will henceforth lead to customers' persistent attitude towards this kind of product or service, which is a continuous emotional feeling, and will influence their willingness to purchase goods or use services afterwards.In actual marketing, consumer satisfaction is one of the main goals of marketing activities.This is because once consumers are satisfied, they are likely to make repeat purchases or endorse the brands they buy.The concept of consumer satisfaction is a consumer-centered product produced with the development of market economy, which reflects the modern marketing concept that the profitability of enterprises is achieved by meeting the needs of consumers and making them satisfied [5].Some experiments in the service sector have also demonstrated a direct relationship between satisfaction and repurchase intention, for example, Cronin and Taylor [6] found that consumer satisfaction is one of the important variables affecting repurchase intention in a study of banking, restaurant and other service sectors.
Consumer satisfaction with co-branded food products is not only about the deliciousness of the product, but also about the rationality of the co-branding, the significance of the co-branding between two or more parties, and the co-branded outer packaging and price.Therefore, co-branded enterprises should not only make use of the gimmick of co-branding for their own benefit, but also see the true will of consumers.Enterprises should conduct field research to understand the influencing factors of consumers' purchase intention for co-branded products so as to truly provide consumers with better co-branded products and achieve corporate development.

Research questionnaire design and data collection 2.1 Questionnaire design
This questionnaire is divided into three parts, the first part is a demographic investigation on the gender, age, income and whether the respondents have purchased cobranded products; the second part is an investigation on the psychological factors of consumers' purchasing cobranded products.In this investigation, consumer psychology is divided into four segments: psychological factors, physiological factors, external stimuli and personal habits.Consumer psychology is measured from the above four aspects and investigated which factors have a greater impact on consumer satisfaction.The third part is the measurement of consumer satisfaction.This questionnaire is a quantitative measurement of the difference between the expected use experience and the actual experience after use to get consumer satisfaction under the influence of consumer psychology.

Respondents and data collection
The investigation was conducted through a questionnaire for people aged 0-40 years old who had experience of purchasing co-branded food products.The questionnaire was distributed online by the questionnaire company, and the quota value was set to collect the sample, and the questionnaire process was "distribute the questionnaireconsumers answer the questions -collect the questionnaire".The total number of samples obtained was 312, the number of valid samples was 243, and the effective rate of the questionnaire was 78%.

Demographic study of respondents
According to the measurement indicators of the questionnaire, and after analyzing the data by Excel, we get the basic personal information of consumers as follows.
As shown from the analysis of the questionnaire data, it can be obtained that the ratio of male to female consumers in the questionnaire sample is 32.37% for male and 67.63% for female, which means that more female consumers than male consumers are purchasing co-branded food products.
As shown from the analysis of the questionnaire data, it can be obtained that the majority of consumers in the questionnaire sample are young people aged 19-30 years old, accounting for 75.96%, fewer people aged 31-40, accounting for 20.51%, and the least people aged 0-18, accounting for 3.53%.
As we shown,it is clear from the data that 48% of the population has a monthly income of 5,000 -10,000, followed by 25.96% of the population with a monthly income of less than 5,000 yuan and 21.47% of the population with a monthly income of 10,000 -20,000, which indicates that consumers of co-branded food products are mostly middle-income group.

Analysis of influencing factors of consumers' purchase motivation
In order to analyze the psychological motivation of consumers to purchase co-branded products, we set 30 questions in the questionnaire and divided them into four major categories, namely, physiological factors, psychological factors, external stimuli and personal habits.This questionnaire was evaluated by 5-Point Likert Scale, (1=Strongly agree 2=Strongly agree 3=Neutral 4=Disagree 5=Strongly disagree).The lower the mean value of the variable items, the higher the influence.Physiological factors indicate the purchase behavior of consumers when they have an urgent need for essential products, such as hunger or thirst.Four main aspects of physiological needs are listed in this questionnaire and the mean value of influence is calculated.Of the four aspects, most consumers choose to buy co-branded food products in hot and cold weather, while few consumers buy co-branded food products just to increase satiety.
Of the psychological factors, the one with the highest influence, that is, the one with the lowest mean value, is buying for the taste they like, which indicates that most consumers are more interested in the taste of food itself, while other factors such as following the trend and wanting to show others are not the most important psychological motivation.
Of the external stimuli, promotions leading to the purchase of co-branded food products are the most influential factor, followed by endorsements by favorite celebrities or artists, indicating that promotions are the main factor promoting consumers to buy co-branded food products.
Of personal habits, the most influential one is the habit of trying new products and thus buying co-branded food products, reflecting that the development and boom of co-branded products has a large fixed group of people who have the habit of collecting co-branded products and then become regular consumers of co-branded food products.

Factor comparison analysis
Among the four influencing aspects of psychological factors, physiological factors, external stimuli and personal habits, we compare the ratio of factors whose mean value of influence is less than or equal to 2.5 to the total factors in that aspect, for example, there are two factors in psychological factors whose mean value of influence is less than 2.5, therefore, the ratio of these two factors to all factors in psychological factors is used as one of our comparisons.From this table, we can see that the mean value of consumers' expectation of the products before purchase is lower than the mean value of consumers' evaluation of the products after purchase, which indicates that there is a tendency for consumers to be less satisfied with the product after purchase, hence most consumers feel dissatisfied after purchasing co-branded food products.Consequently, merchants should go deep into consumers and understand their real needs, so that consumers can really buy satisfactory products.

Conclusions
For co-branded food products, consumer groups are more female than male consumers, and middle-income groups are in the majority, revealing that the needs of this group have changed from basic physiological needs to higher-level needs.All four categories of consumer motivation have a great impact on consumer purchasing behavior, and the most influential category is external stimuli, indicating that some of the promotional tools of the merchants are the main factors promoting consumer purchasing behavior.The comparison of consumers' expectations before purchase and evaluation after purchase shows that most consumers are not particularly satisfied with the co-branded food products.

Recommendations
Despite the rapid development of co-branded food products in recent years, it has also gained a large number of fans to support and follow up.Their product design, product promotion and release are being improved, but there are still some serious problems.All parties of co-branded enterprises deserve to think seriously about how to achieve better results in the future development and how to really take consumers into consideration and improve their satisfaction.Through the analysis of the investigation data, some suggestions for their development are put forward:

Improve product quality to effectively meet the needs of consumers
As the most significant motivation for consumers choosing to buy co-branded products is external stimuli, if enterprises cannot improve product quality while attracting consumers, then consumers will fail to find the value of purchasing in co-branded products, and then consumers will certainly not be satisfied with the products.Therefore, improving the quality of co-branded products is the first task for enterprises to improve consumer satisfaction.

Select suitable co-branded partners
Most consumers buy co-branded products for the attraction of the IP or celebrities of the co-branded products, in which case enterprises should choose reasonable and similarly positioned co-branded partners so that the enterprise can gain more economic value or public opinion value.In addition, choosing a quality cobranded enterprise is also conducive to improving product quality and thus consumer satisfaction.

Provide personalized products
More of the people who buy co-branded food products are young people.They prefer novel products and pursue fashion and value.Different co-branded enterprises in the food industry can provide more innovative products based on different consumer characteristics and different target groups to improve the diversity of products, thus meeting the various consumer needs and gaining more consumers as well as better consumer satisfaction.

Table 1 .
Influence of physiological factors

Table 2 .
Factor comparison analysis