Research On The Mechanism Of Consumer's Brand Knowledge Formation And Backward Influence

From the view of consumers, the process of brand growth could divide into at least three parts: consumers' receiving brand information, producing specific cognition to the brand, leading to preference and brand loyalty. Brand knowledge is the key of the process. The brand knowledge can be understood as personalization information in consumers' memory which concludes both descriptive and appraisive factors. Consumer's brand knowledge acts as foundational role in the process of decision-making and decides consumer's behavior directly. After the literature review of consumer behavior pattern, perceived value and brand knowledge, the paper takes two kinds of representative high-tech brands which are mobile phone and computer as the objects, researches on the consumers' brand knowledge contents, formation mechanism based on the information source and the effect on the behavior.The paper discusses the contents of brand knowledge by focus-group interview and questionnaire survey. Firstly, the paper takes certain common brands in mobile phone and computer as objective, obtains consumers' high-tech brand knowledge item poll by the focus-group interview, and divides consumers' brand knowledge into 30 categories through preliminary qualitative analysis. Secondly, the paper divides consumer's brand knowledge into seven parts by the questionnaire survey and data processed. They are brand awareness, product knowledge, enterprise knowledge, perceived benefit, perceived sacrifice, perceived involvement and competitive brand knowledge. By focus-group interview, the paper also discovers that advertisement, use experience, word of mouth and education are the main way to form the brand knowledge. Also according to the result of focus-group interview, the paper draws up the picture of high-tech brand knowledge in consumers' brain by the method of "brain concept map" where performance-to-price ratio, company strength , original area and logo hold the important position.The contents of consumers' brand knowledge have both overlapping and similarity with brand image, brand association and brand equity. The paper probes into these concepts and formed the questionnaire about consumers' brand knowledge. Besides non-uniformity, tacitness and variability, high-tech brands as mobile phone and computer have certain unique characteristics. For example, the "social benefit" that the high-tech brands bring to the consumers has been desalinated, the high-tech "black box" exists obviously, company plays an important role in consumers' brain, consumers' cogitation about brand personality is not obvious. These characters produce complex influence on consumer's behavior tendency.The information sources influent consumers' brand knowledge through the different channel. The advertisement in long-term influents consumes' brand cognition through frequency and content, the word-of-mouth influents consumer by frequency, promulgator and content. Use experience influent s consumers' brand memory directly and profoundly. Based on the different mechanism that the information source influent s the consumers, the paper constructs the analysis frame from the information source to the consumer brand knowledge, in which perceived involvement plays moderating role. The paper analyses the degree that different information source influent consumers' brand knowledge, find the importance of communication way that the company could not control directly and provide the advice for the enterprises' maximizing the value of marketing resources.The interior of consumers' brand knowledge has relatively complex interaction. The paper indicates that, brand awareness play foundational role in high-tech brand knowledge, which not only is the premise to form the cognition of specific brand, but also can strengthen the consumers' perceived value. Consumers' cognition to the high-tech company is an active factor in brand knowledge, which has direct influence on both consumer's brand awareness and perceived value.The bridge from consumers' brand knowledge to behavior tendency is the quality of brand relations. In consumers' knowledge, perceived benefit and the cognition to company are the most obvious factors to affect relationship quality and behavior tendency. The relationship quality between consumer and high-tech brand could be measured by satisfaction, trust and commitment. Consumer's satisfaction mainly comes from his perceived value to the brand, but satisfaction does not influent behavior tendency directly, which means it is not enough to focus on the consumers' satisfaction for the company. Trust comes from the perceived enterprises' strength, perceived value and accumulative satisfaction, which has positive influence on the consumers' premium purchase behavior. The brand commitment is the result of accumulative satisfaction and trust, which has no relationship directly with consumers' brand knowledge. Brand commitment could influent consumers' behavior tendency obviously and directly, and forecast on loyalty behavior such as oral introduction, premium purchase and repeat buy stably. The relationship quality between consumer and high-tech brand could be influented by competitive brand. The paper find that the behavior of competitive brand could not only influent the quality of relationship between consumer and certain brand, but also could medicate the influence between different component of brand knowledge and relationship quality.The process that the consumers gain and use the high-tech brand knowledge is also the process that high-tech company accumulates its brand equity. The paper give advices to brand growth from raising platform of high-tech company, the facilitation and activation of brand knowledge, the way to accumulate brand equity by consumers' cognition, and so on. Through comparative analysis on the formation of brand knowledge in different original area and different scale, the paper also gives some advice not only for the growth of native high-tech brands but also for medium and small brands.