Influence of Brand Attitude on Purchase Intention of Modular Kitchen in Chennai City

The purpose of current study is to investigate the influence of brand attitude on customers’ purchase intention. Population was customers of branded modular kitchen in Chennai city. Using a self-administrated questionnaire 220 respondents were asked to answer the survey employing convenience-sampling method. The results indicated that advertising on print media and social media have significant impact on brand attitude. Further, brand attitude has a significant influence on purchase intention of consumers. Citation: Gomathy M, Rajan KKS (2018) Influence of Brand Attitude on Purchase Intention of Modular Kitchen in Chennai City. J Account Mark 7: 300. doi: 10.4172/2168-9601.1000300


Introduction
Along with the rapid spread of real estate industry, the global housing market is entering a new phase. However, without an adequate supply of land, people will have to pay a high price for housing. The modern society has granted us a better and easier lifestyle to afford and adopt in what we have. Modular kitchen certainly offers the consumers' expectations while manufacturing and fitting of modular kitchen. Thus, the success of any enterprise is greatly dependent on consumer reaction and behaviour. In today's competitive market, brands have to make the product stand out the competition. Thus it is vital to show up brands for good reasons to make the consumers feel to purchase.
The idea of the kitchen is itself a transformation that it is becoming a social space for family and friends and a marker of your personal growth and status. On the basis of sales marketing and retail sales, the retailer or dealer dominating the modular kitchen market in India is for 76% of the total market size, while project sales constitute the rest of the 24%. The low-end modular kitchen market is in the hands of local small producers, and the high-end products are controlled by the foreign brands, specially the brands from Italy and Germany, like Bulthaup, Franke, Häfele, Miele, Neoperl, Nolte, Peka, Poggenpohl, Veneta Cucine CC India, Häcker and Hettich etc.
In this situation, the Indian market for modular kitchen is highly competitive between the multinationals and local Indian counterparts, (i.e.) the branded and unbranded products. To overcome this situation one need to understand and identify their target customer. The most successful companies will have their hands on information that identifies and explains the needs and behaviour of their target customers. According to Ubilava et al., the behavior of consumers cannot easily be schematised, given the specific characteristics of each individual, it is proved that the consumer's preference for either branded or unbranded goods decided the process of choosing a product also argued that brands serves as a primary way for customers to identify and recognize goods and their manufacturer. Consumer preference on brand is a key factor in consumer decision making process, involving elements of choice.
According to Mitchell and Olson describing attitude with a more specific reference to brands as 'an individual's internal evaluation of an object such as a branded product [1]. Brand attitude is made up of the overall evaluation of the brand, which encompasses factors such as brand awareness, brand image, and brand based associations of attributes and benefits [2]. Also Jalilvand & Samiei discussed that brand attitude is affected by brand awareness and brand image [3]. Brand attitudes are also important to marketers as they provide a summary of a consumer's evaluation of the product/service/brand (Belch and Belch, 2003). Furthermore, Brand attitudes impact on the ultimate goal of creating a purchase intention among consumers [4].
Therefore, the present study takes up brand attitude as an independent variable and purchase intention as a dependent variable to measure the influence of brand attitude which is measured by the strength of positive or negative (like/dislike) associations that a consumer experience with regard to a particular brand; on consumers purchase intention.

Literature Review
Past researches support that there is a significant influence of brand attitude on consumer purchase intention. Brand attitude is made up of the overall evaluation of the brand, which encompasses factors such as brand awareness, brand image, and brand based associations of attributes and benefits [2]. Also Fazio, Russell H. suggests demographic factors can form of brand attitude, consumer behavior [5]. Earlier studies showed that consumers tend to adopt a decision rule to purchase familiar and well-known brands. Consumers purchasing behavior is linked to an understanding of consumer behaviour.
The new empowered medium currently available and has been recognised as the most potentially powerful medium in business practice is social media. The emergence of social media has facilitated communication of consumer to each other. Godes and Mayzlin showed that social media are cost effective and they are suitable option to access and collect information from other consumers. Chevalier and Mayzlin found that increasing visits of a particular book lead to increasing sale of the book. Dellarocas et al., added online ranking of a certain film to their model and revealed that this factor has a strong predictive power of company income. Bruyn and Lilien studied the effect of consumer communications to each other in the process of decision making in the context of viral marketing. Simon and Sullivan asserted that marketing communications should be considered as an important determinant of brand attitude and equity. Yoo et al., indicated that print advertising have a positive influence on brand equity, brand loyalty, brand awareness and brand attitude.
Hence we have taken print media and social media as a medium of communication to form a brand attitude which influences purchase intention of consumer.

Research Methodology
To achieve the study objectives, a self-administered survey questionnaire was developed based on the findings of existing literature review. The questionnaire was pre-tested and revised. The survey consisted of four parts covering the following variables: social media, traditional media (print advertising); brand attitude, and purchase intention the sample size taken for the study is 220 [3]. A convenience sampling approach was used to collect data. Regression, Kruskal Wallis and Mann Witney U test were employed to analyze data using SPSS software.

Analysis and interpretation
In order to examine whether there exist a significant difference between the average intensity of purchase intention and the personal factors of consumers such as age, gender, educational qualification, marital status, lifestyle, social class, occupation, nature of self, personality, spouse employment status.

Purchase intention based on family type
To test whether there exist a significant difference between the average intensity of purchase intention and the family type, Mann-Whitney U-test has been computed to test the formulated null hypothesis and the results are presented in following Table 1. H 0 : There is no significant difference between the average intensity of purchase intention and family type.
From the above table, it is seen that the Z value is -3.311 with the corresponding p value of 0.000. Since the value of p is less than 0.05, the null hypothesis is getting rejected. So it is concluded that there exist a significant difference between the average intensity of purchase intention and family type.

Purchase intention based on family income
To test whether there exist a significant difference between the average intensity of purchase intention and family income, Kruskal Wallis ranked analysis of variance has been computed to test the formulated hypothesis (Table 2).
H 0 : The average intensity of purchase intention is identical irrespective of their family income.
The above table shows that the value of chi-square statistics is 10.066 with the corresponding p value of 0.008. Since the value of p is less than 0.05, the null hypothesis is getting rejected. So it is concluded that there exist a significant difference between the average intensity of purchase intention and family income.

Influence of brand attitude on Purchase intention of Modular Kitchen
Purchase intention depends on the influencing brand attitude, the total scores of purchase intention has been taken as dependent variable and the total scores of each brand attitude have been taken as the independent variables. The below stated hypothesis is formulated and the multiple regression analysis is carried out to test the formulated hypothesis. The results of this analysis are presented in below tabular columns (Tables 3 and 4).

Findings and Suggestions
From the analysis, it is found that the individuals those who are single, who lives in nuclear family, the who are employed, having 2 -2.5 lakhs as their monthly family income, who are having the lifestyle of sports oriented, who has gregarious personality, who are modern in nature, having employed spouse, and are upper class have been identified as the right segment of individuals those who are having high intensity of purchase intention. Hence marketers have to design an appropriate marketing strategy for selling branded modular kitchens to these targeted customers.     It is found that the brand attitude positively influences purchase intention in terms of social media advertising. Thus, brand attitude formed through social media advertising are strongly induces purchase intention of buying branded modular kitchens. Hence, the marketers of modular kitchens have to develop various interactive communication tactics which creates more favourable attitude from consumers [6].

Family
In the cases of print media advertising, the results proven that content quality has scored a positive influence on purchase intention of buying branded modular kitchens. Mitchell and Olson identified that providing user-based quality content as the best way to improve brand attitude and purchase intentions. Hence, it is suggested that the marketers of branded modular kitchens have to provide user-based quality content for the individuals those who approached them, this would increase consumers' level of brand consciousness and might resulted in positive attitude of consumers towards and increases sales preciously.

Managerial Implication
From this study, the marketers can find potential consumers of modular kitchen brands which help to mould the advertising content that will be desirable for their target market to construct a favorable brand attitude.
As the findings suggests that brand attitude significantly influences consumer purchase intention. Furthermore, it is revealed that the consumers respond more favorably to modular kitchen brands that closely match to their personal styles therefore suggesting that marketers need to conduct market research interviewing prospective consumers on their personal and psychological preferences.

Limitations
This research study is limited to Chennai city only and its results cannot be generalized in other cities due to socio-cultural and economic differences.
This study focused on the branded modular kitchen dealers who are available in Chennai city. Thus the result is limited to Chennai modular kitchen dealers and may differ in other area dealers.
This research studied only the influence of brand attitudes on consumer purchase intention. Also there are various other variables which might influence consumers' purchase decision, but that are not studied and mentioned.
Future researchers may investigate the research framework of this study in different product types and other brands to generalize the findings across brands and product types.
Also, the present study has found the influence of brand attitudes on purchase intention of modular kitchen in Chennai city. Future research may focus on the impact of brand attitudes and consumer loyalty and satisfaction would give additional and useful findings to marketers.

Conclusion
Results of present study are useful for the retailers or dealers of modular kitchen industry in Chennai city. As social media forms a positive brand attitude and influences customers' intention to purchase modular kitchen. Thus they should try to encourage customers to speak each other about the products and services. These conversations can be face-to-face or virtual through social media such as chat rooms in Facebook. This focus on the improvement of product and service quality of modular kitchen and also make possible in providing them fair prices to the customers in an attempt to satisfy them. Satisfied customers would have positive attitude towards the brand and they would disseminate positive word of mouth in social media. In terms of print media, consumers showed positive attitude in terms of content, color, size and quality etc. Thus the marketers need to focus on these elements while designing print media advertising contents. At last, psychographic variables namely, lifestyle and personality showed positive effects on branded modular kitchen purchase intention. Therefore, engaged on content of communication and adopting new reliable technologies like mobile advertising to propagate information regarding modular kitchen brands will provide more positive attitude and results over brands and sales to the marketers.