| As market globalization progresses, it has been observed that an increasing number of multinational companies are reorganizing their brand portfolios, which were different across countries, favoring a global brand strategy. However, despite the increasing adoption of global branding practice in the marketplace, studies on this topic are scarce and current understanding of the topic is limited since studies to date have defined global brands from a supply rather than a demand side perspective; as a result, they have failed to include the most important component of branding, consumers. The objective of the present study lies in exploring the meanings of global brands from the consumer's perspective in a developing country, Korea. This study investigated consumers' thoughts, meanings, and values associated with brand category labels by conducting three studies that combined both qualitative and quantitative approaches in Korea using student samples.; This study confirmed some of the previously identified consumer associations with the global brand category label (e.g., quality and prestige) and provided several new insights. With respect to RQ, the overall research question of this study, the results from three studies showed that consumers perceived similar associations with the global and foreign brand category labels when asked directly (study 1: Likert-type scale). Similarly, when asked to identify exemplars associated with each label (study 2), a good amount of overlap (63 percent) was found between global and foreign brand exemplars. Even so, there were differences in the thoughts, attributes, meanings, and values associated with the global versus foreign brand category label in study 1 and particularly, in study 3. These somewhat contradictory results seem to indicate that the global brand category label is rather an evolving concept that overlaps with the foreign brand category label. Furthermore, the global brand category label appears to encompass some high-achieving local brands. These results seem to reflect global brands' relative newness compared to other brand category labels, especially in a developing country like Korea where the introduction of global brands is relatively recent. Managerial implications and suggestions for future studies were also discussed. |
