An exploration study to find important factors influencing on brand identification

Article history: Received May 12, 2013 Received in revised format 12 August 2013 Accepted 14 August 2013 Available online August 15 2013 Building a famous brand often makes it possible to have sustainable growth in competitive market. A good brand name plays an important role on increasing word of mouth advertisement, the number of loyal customers and repurchase habits. However, in order to build a good brand, we need to create sustainable brand identification and to do this we need to determine influential factors. This paper presents an empirical investigation to find important factors influencing brand identification. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 23 questions, distributes it among 400 people who purchase regularly from hyperstar and collects 400 filled ones. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.735. In addition, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Approx. Chi-Square are 0.784 and 2300.022, respectively. Based on the results of our survey, we have derived five factors including sense of brand, brand community, trust to brand, value of brand and personality of brand. © 2013 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
Brand plays an important role for the success on all organizations and there are different studies on helping business owners find to take necessary actions on building a good brand (Turner, 1975;Lu et al., 2008;Aaker, 2011).There is always a relationship between brand identity and brand image (Laforet, 2009;Nelson, 1970;Keller et al., 2011;Kapferer, 2012).In addition, there are various kinds of identification.According to Ashforth and Mael (1989), "social identification stems from the categorization of individuals, the distinctiveness and prestige of the group, the salience of outgroups, and the factors that traditionally are associated with group formation".Alsem and Kostelijk (2008) performed an investigation to identity based marketing in a new balanced marketing paradigm.They reported that the brand identity could be considered the representative of the resource based view since identity will be based on competences and capabilities.Bhattacharya and Sen (2003) explained consumer-company identification by presenting a framework for understanding consumers' relationships with companies.Gioia et al. (2000) argued that because of the reciprocal interrelationships between identity and image, organizational identity, rather than enduring, is better perceived as a fluid and unstable concept.They also argued that instead of destabilizing a business unit, the instability in identity is actually adaptive in reaching some changes.Bhattacharya and Sen (2003) tried to determine why and under what conditions consumers enter into strong, committed, and meaningful relationships with certain firms, becoming champions of these firms and their products.Kuenzel and Halliday (2008) analyzed the influences of prestige, satisfaction, and communication on brand identification and to demonstrate how brand identification impacts word-of-mouth and brand repurchase.Geuens et al. (2009) presented a new measure of brand personality where the new measure proved to be reliable for between-brand between-category comparisons, for between-brand within-category comparisons, and for between-respondent comparisons.In addition, the scale showed high test-retest reliability and cross-cultural validity.Ghodeswar (2008) identified important elements of brand building based on a literature review and case studies of successful brands in India.He reported that brand-building effort has to be aligned with organizational processes that, which assist to deliver the promises to customers through all company departments, intermediaries, suppliers, etc., as all these play an essential role in the experience customers had with the brand.According to McCormack et al. (2004) developing and maintaining a consistent brand statement is an essential perspective of developing a successful product.Nevertheless, maintaining that statement is tedious task because the inconsistent and often insufficient understanding of brand by marketing, engineering, and industrial design.Scott and Lane (2000) developed a model of organizational identity construction, which reframes organizational identity within the broader context of manager-stakeholder relationships and more effectively integrates theory on organizational identity and organizational identification.They explained organizational identity as emerging from complex, dynamic, and reciprocal interactions among managers, organizational members, and other stakeholders.The model also concentrated on organizational identity as negotiated cognitive images.Ganesan (1994) proposed a method for determinants of long-term orientation in buyer-seller relationships.Smidts et al. (2001) investigated the impact of employee communication and perceived external prestige on organizational identification.

The proposed study
This paper presents an empirical investigation to find important factors influencing brand identification.The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 23 questions, distributes it among 400 people who purchase regularly from Hyperstar and collects 400 filled ones.Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.735.
In addition, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Approx.Chi-Square are 0.784 and 2300.022,respectively.Since we plan to factor analysis and this method is sensitive to skewness of the data we first look at some of the basic statistics including the skewness of the data, which are summarized in Table 1.As we can observe from the results of Table 1, all skewness data are within an acceptable limit and we do not need to remove any question from the survey.Valid N (listwise) 400 Table 2 demonstrates the results of factor analysis on these factors.Based on the results of our survey, we have derived five factors including sense of brand, brand community, trust to brand, value of brand and personality of brand summarized in Table 3 as follows,

Discussion and conclusion
The results of Table 3 indicate that there were five factors including sense of brand, brand community, trust to brand, value of brand and personality of brand.In terms of sense of brand, brand recognition, being trustable, specialty, attractiveness and sense of brand.Brand community is the second factor consists of five sub-components including brand image, brand recall, existing literature on brand, value of brand and brand alliances.The third factor, trust to brand, consists of six factors including the essence of brand, brand differentiation, internal and external influences, credibility of brand, brand awareness and organizational studies.Value of brand is the fourth factor, which includes two sub-components of reputation and honesty.Technical support is the fifth factor with four subcomponent including brand equity, theory of social psychology/social identity, attitudes and values and rational perspective.Finally, personality of brand is the last item, which includes brand personality and picture.

Table 1
The summary of basic descriptive statistics

Table 2
The summary of principal component analysis after rotationIn addition to the results of Table 2, we have looked at Scree plot to determine important factors and the results of figure and Table indicate that there were six factors.

Table 3
The summary of factor analysis