Investigating the effects of brand experience components on power of brand in food industry

Article history: Received May 4, 2014 Accepted 24 September 2014 Available online September 29 2014 This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of brand power experiences on power of brand in food industry. The study deigns a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 23 questions, distributes it among 208 randomly selected people who purchase foods from three different food chains in city of Tehran, Iran. Using structural equation modeling, the study has examined the effects of six factors influence the most in our survey including Brand loyalty, Physical attributes, pricing factors, functional characteristics, brand association and brand position. The results of our survey indicate that pricing factors and brand position were the most important influential factors followed by functional characteristics and physical attributes. However, the survey does not confirm the effects of brand loyalty and brand association on brand power. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Power of brand Brand loyalty Food industry Pricing factor Physical attributes


Introduction
During the past few years, there have been various studies on methods for improvement of brand characteristics (Schembri, 2009;Bulmer & Buchanan-Oliver, 2010;Hultén, 2011).The role of brands and branding in the new economy characterized by digitization and globalization are absorbing significant attention (Rowley, 2004).Morgan-Thomas and Veloutsou (2013) presented some insights from marketing and information systems research to reach at an integrative model of online brand experience.In their model, emotional characteristics of brand relationship supplement the dimension of technology acceptance to reach at a more complete understanding of consumer experience with an online brand.The study involved structural equation modeling and the results demonstrated that trust and perceived usefulness positively could influence on online brand experience.Jones et al. (2010) explored the emergence and development of experience stores and to investigated their potential role in fostering consumer brand relationships and their effect on the retail landscape.They provided an accessible review of the emergence of experience stores and their effect in developing relationships between brands and consumers.Ha and Perks (2005) investigated the effects of consumer perceptions of brand experience on the web by considering the effects of brand familiarity, satisfaction and brand trust.Gabisch and Gwebu (2011) examined the effect of virtual experiences on attitude formation, and offline purchase intentions, and determined three kinds of channel congruence, which help explain the cross-channel effects.They reported that multichannel impacts existed between virtual brand experiences and real-world purchasing decisions.According to Alloza (2008), "successful corporate brand management lies on sounded brand engagement and strategic alignment initiatives".Kim and Sullivan (1998) studied the effect of parent brand experience on line extension trial and repeat purchase.Iglesias et al. (2011) investigated the role of brand experience and affective commitment in determining brand loyalty.Morrison and Crane (2007) presented a survey on building the service brand by creating and managing an emotional brand experience.Boo et al. (2009) presented a model of customer-based brand equity and discussed its application to multiple destinations.

The proposed study
The proposed study of this paper investigates the effects of various brand experience components on brand power.Fig. 1 demonstrates the proposed study of this paper.1. Brand loyalty influences positively on power of brand.
2. Physical attributes influence positively on power of brand.
3. Pricing factors influence positively on power of brand.4. Functional characteristics influence positively on power of brand. 5. Brand association influences positively on power of brand.6. Brand position influences positively on power of brand.
The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire consists of 23 questions and distributes it among 208 randomly selected regular customers of different supply chains active in city of Tehran, Iran.Fig. 2 presents details of personal characteristics of the participants.As we can observe from the results of Fig. 2, over two-third of the participants were female and nearly 82% of them aged 21-30, which means there young people.Finally, our survey has accomplished among people who had good university education.In fact, over 60% of them had, at least, bachelor of sciences.Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.787, which is above the minimum acceptable level of 0.70.In addition, The results of communalities indicate that most components are within acceptable levels.Next, we present details of principal component analysis.As we can observe from the results of Table 3 and Fig. 3, six factors influence the most in our survey including Brand loyalty, Physical attributes, pricing factors, functional characteristics, brand association and brand position.Finally, Fig. 4 shows details of the effects of the main components.As we can observe from the results of Fig. 5, all components have positive impact on power of brand with various effects.In our survey, functional characteristics as well as brand position maintained the highest impact followed by brand association.

Discussion and conclusion
In this paper, we have presented an empirical investigation to study the effects of brand experience components on power of brand in food industry.Using structural equation modeling, the study has examined the effects of six factors influence the most in our survey including Brand loyalty, Physical attributes, pricing factors, functional characteristics, brand association and brand position.Table 4 demonstrates the results of our findings.

Table 4
The results of examining the effects of six factors on brand position Based on the results of Table 4, we can conclude that pricing factors and brand position are the most important influential factors followed by functional characteristics and physical attributes.However, the survey does not confirm the effects of brand loyalty and brand association on brand power.The results of this survey are consistent with Chen and Liu (2004), Payne et al. (2009), Zarantonello and Schmitt (2010), Clatworthy (2012), O'Cass and Grace ( 2004), Baldinger and Rubinson (1996) and Bennett and Rundle-Thiele (2002).

Fig. 4 .Fig. 5 .
Fig. 4. The summary of factors with weights Table1shows details of Cronbach alpha calculated for all questions and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy is equal to 0.726.

Table 2
The summary of communalities

Table 3
The summary of principal component analysis