A study on the effects of sales related factors on brand equity

Article history: Received January 4, 2014 Accepted 1 June 2014 Available online June 3 2014 This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of sales related factors on brand equity. The study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among all 353 sales representatives who work for a dairy producer in province of Mazandaran, Iran. Using principal component analysis, seven variables including qualification criteria, motivation, personality, empowering sales representative, information size, personal characteristics and sales interest in job on brand equity are extracted. The implementation of structural equation modeling has confirmed that there were positive and meaningful relationships between seven factors and brand equity. The highest impact belongs to empowering sales representative followed by qualification criteria, quantity of information, personality and sales motivation. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
The strategic planning process can be normally linked with corporate goal formulation but it is argued that bigger progress would be constructed in understanding marketing's participation in strategic planning if marketing's role in the goal formulation process can be accomplished.Unfortunately, the extant theories of the firm are inadequate in varying degrees for this purpose.Anderson (1982) proposed a new theory of the firm, which attempts to specify the role of marketing and the other functional areas in the goal setting and strategic planning process.There are literally several methods for sales promotion and management such as sales force automation (SFA) (Barker et al. 2009), which is the implementation of software to automate sales tasks, including sales activities, order processing, customer management, sales forecasting and analysis, sales force management, and information sharing.According to Bente et al. (2012), reputation and seller photos hold a large and equally sized capability for sellers' "face work" in most online transactions.Buehrer et al. (2005) explored the reasons why salespeople use SFA technologies, the perceived barriers to SFA usage and how management may increase the usage of SFA technology.Cascio et al. (2010) introduced a new antecedent to the SFA adoption model, management commitment alignment (MCA) and explained that alignment between top management and immediate supervisors' commitment to the SFA technology played essential role on SFA adoption.Their results indicated that while commitment from both leadership levels seemed to be the most conducive to SFA adoption, misaligned commitment conditions maintained differential impacts on adoption.More specifically, even when supervisors are committed to sales technology, insufficient top management commitment may hurt SFA adoption.Cho and Chang (2008) empirically investigated the psychological and social antecedents of salespeople's resistance toward SFA technologies in South Korea.They added to the literature on SFA technologies by looking at resistance toward innovation in the post-adoption as well as intraorganizational diffusion stage.Franke and Park (2006) combined findings from a sample of 155 salespeople to examine alternative methods of antecedents and consequences of adaptive selling behavior (ASB) and customer orientation (CO).They reported that selling experience could increase performance but not job satisfaction, and saleswomen rated their performance and satisfaction bigger than salesmen did.The magnitudes of the relationships in their survey also indicated that ASB and selling experience had bigger impacts than CO and gender on salesperson performance did.Gohmann et al. (2005) reported the results of a study, which concentrated on the differences in perceptions held by the United States Army's hiring force and its top-level management toward the Army's newly adopted SFA system, the Army Recruiting Information Support System (ARISS).They reported that substantial differences existed between the perceptions held by the recruiting force and higher level management toward ARISS, the SFA system.

The proposed study
This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of sales related factors on brand equity.The study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among all 353 sales representatives who work for a dairy producer in province of Mazandaran, Iran.Fig. 1 demonstrates some basic personal characteristics of the participants.According to the results of Fig. 1, 63% of the participants were male and 37% of them were female.In addition, most participants were middle-aged people.Approximately, 85% of the participants hold some university education.In addition, the results of Fig. 1 have indicated that most of the sales representative had less than 5 years of job experiences.

Years of job experiences
Age Years of education examine the hypotheses of the survey.Table 1 shows details of commonalities for 60 questions of the survey.

Table 1
The results of commonalities As we can observe from the results of Table 1, most values are well above 0.5, which validates the overall questionnaire.We have removed some questions and applied principal component analysis and Table 2 shows details of the results after rotation has been applied.

The results
Table 3 demonstrates the results of the implementation of structural equation modeling (SEM).

Table 3
The summary of SEM implementation Next, we use the results of factor analysis to verify the effects of these seven factors on brand equity.The results of some basic statistics are Chi-square = 701.87;RMSEA = 0.063; X 2 /df = 1.76;CFI = 0.96; IFI = 0.96; RFI= 0.91; AGFI = 0.87; NNFI = 0.93, which are within acceptable limits.

Discussion and Conclusion
The implementation of structural equation modeling has provided us good insight to examine the effects of seven important factors influencing on brand equity.Table 4 shows details of our findings on testing the hypotheses of the survey.

Table 4
The results of structural equation modeling According to the results of Table 4, all seven factors influence on brand equity, positively.The highest impact belongs to empowering sales representative followed by qualification criteria, quantity of information, personality and sales motivation.

Fig. 1 .
Fig. 1.The summary of job experience, age and years of educationThe study considers the effects of seven variables including qualification criteria, motivation, personality, empowering sales representative, information size, personal characteristics and sales interest in job on brand equity.Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy along with Bartlett's test have been accomplished and the results are 0.879 and Chi-Square = 4554.141with Sig.= 0.000.These results have indicated that the questionnaire is reliable and we may rely on to