Research On Influence Of The Congruence Of Consumer Self-Concept And Brand Personality On Brand Relationship Quality

With the advent of economic globalization, the competition between enterprises has become increasingly fierce. The intense competitive environment, not only is a great challenge, it also provides opportunities for enterprises. How to seize these opportunities and successfully occupy a space in the market has become primary issue for enterprises nowadays. Especially, products now have higher homogeneity, their function is not apparently different. So why consumers buy products from one company, but give up others’? The reason lies in consumer psychology, that is, the brand has been recognized to have a good image.In the view of consumer behavior, consumers will have a kind of emotion towards a brand. That is to say, brand can form some kind of emotion in one’s heart because of its brand recognition, people may think about if the brand is his favorite, form relationship with the brand, which is called as "brand relationship" in academia. We measure the degree of brand relationship with " brand relationship quality ". Whether consumers like the brand or not is actually based on if the brand personality is in line with consumers’ self-concept. In marketing, when the brand personality is accord with consumers’ self-concept, we usually name it the "consumer self-concept congruity", hence consumer self-concept consistency has certain impact on brand relationship quality. And self-concept was defined as "your overall views and feeling about yourself (Sirgy1982; Wylie1989), it showed that self-concept is not opinions of others, but the cognitive about their own. It can be divided into "real self-concept" and "ideal self-concept". Aaker (1997) believed that brand personality is a group of personification features based on brand association. The definition of consumer self-concept consistency was first put forward formally in1997by the famous scholar Sirgy (1997). It refered to a kind of subjective feeling of consumers when they use products, the feeling was generated by comparing consumer self-concept and brand personality, and was divided into true self-concept consistency and ideal self-consistency.Zinkhan and Hong (1991) found that, if a product or brand was used in public places, consumers would be more willing to choose the brand which was consistent with the ideal self-concept. On the contrary, if a product or brand was used privately, consumers would be more willing to choose the brand according with true self-concept. Therefore, I apply the consumption situation, which combines public and private occasions, in my research, to respectively study different influence of two dimensions of brand self-concept congruity on brand relationship quality in separate consumption situation.This article mainly research for the influence of consumer self-concept (real self-concept and ideal self-concept) and brand personality consistency on brand relationship quality. It also studies, in different consumption situation (private and public), the effect on brand relationship quality of two dimensions of consumer self-concept consistency and brand personality consistency. According to former related research and previous analysis, I put forward the following two viewpoints: i, Consumer self-concept (real self-concept and ideal self-concept) consistency and consistency of brand personality have positive impact on brand relationship quality. ii, In different consumption situations (private or public), two dimensions of consumer self-concept consistency and brand personality consistency have different effect on brand relationship quality.From the perspective of consumer self-concept and brand personality consistency, this paper has summarized former related research and related literature review about them, to study the exact meaning of consumer self-concept and brand personality consistency and the dimensions of them. Then I come up with two dimensions about consumer self-concept and brand personality consistency in this paper, namely the consumer real self-concept and consumer ideal self-concept and brand personality consistency. Next, this paper reviews present studies about the consumer brand relationship quality, makes the definition of brand relationship quality clear, and studies the measurement method and latest research hot spot about it. On these basis, to respectively study different influence of two dimensions of brand self-concept congruity on brand relationship quality in different consumption situation (privately or publicly used), I introduce the consumption situation as moderating variable. Finally, the model this research has been formed. According to the model and related theory, I put forward corresponding hypothesis.In order to effectively prove out hypothesis, I mainly take quantitative research methods, supplemented by qualitative research methods, and choose convenience sampling for data collection. I finally collected405effective questionnaires. Descriptive statistical analysis has been done firstly using SPSS20.0to preliminarily get the basic information of samples. The results of Cronbach’s alpha coefficient and factor analysis on the scale reliability and validity show that it has great reliability and validity. Then I analyze the correlation between consumer self-concept and brand personality consistency respectively with brand relationship quality, it has also proved that there is a significant correlation between the two. Finally, the data of regression analysis verify assumptions.Main conclusions of this paper are as follows:Consumer self-concept (real self-concept and ideal self-concept) consistency and consistency of brand personality have positive impact on brand relationship quality.In different consumption situations (private or public), two dimensions of consumer self-concept consistency and brand personality consistency have different effect on brand relationship quality. That means:if a product or brand is used privately, the influence of consistency of consumers’ real self-concept and brand personality consistency on brand relationship quality is greater than the effect of the consistency of consumers’ideal self-concept and brand personality consistency on brand relationship quality. For the brand used in public, the consistency of consumer ideal self-concept and brand personality have greater impact on brand relationship quality than the consumer real self-concept and brand personality consistency.Based on above conclusions, the author gives suggestions and countermeasures from following aspects. First, it helps market research to know more about customer demand. Second, it divides market with a new perspective. Third, enterprises’effort should be consistent with consumer self-concept and brand personality to improve the quality of brand relationship.The innovation of this research lies in:first, previous research didn’t study the influence of consumer self-concept consistency on brand relationship quality. My paper is carried out to study the effect of self-concept consistency on brand relationship quality from two dimensions. Second, I select two similar brands to reduce interference caused by different brands. Third, I choose consumption situation as moderating variable to respectively study different influence of two dimensions of self-concept congruity on brand relationship quality in different consumption situation (privately or publicly used).