The Study Of Relationship Between Brand Association Of Smart Phones And Purchase Intention With The Regulation Of Reference Groups

With the common progress of science and economy, smart phones have become a necessity. Therefore, researches on consumer psychology and behavior to buy smart phones are becoming increasingly important. But in terms of scientific trends on smart phones, most of the literature focus on the analysis of market’s competition, or technology such as Cloud Computing. While researches on characteristics or influenced factors of consumer behavior based on smart phones’ industry background are rare. As smart phone is high-tech product,factors affecting consumer behavior or its customer features are different from other industries.Now based on the industry background of the smart phones, discussing whether brand association of smart phones can significantly affect purchase intention or not.Simultaneously, based on the degree of consumer group matching with the different reference group, through empirical data analysis, study if the types of consumer’s reference groups will play a moderating effect, which makes brand association of smart phone influence the customers’ purchase willingness differently. In order to ensure logical study, reference groups should be divided into two levels: The first level is the members of reference groups and non-members of reference groups; the second level is various types of non-members, namely aspiration reference groups, dissociative reference groups and neutral reference groups. Then taking two levels of the reference groups as the manipulated variable respectively, discussing the different impacted models of independent variable on dependent variable, and one by one to explore moderating effects belong to various dimensions of brand association.Empirical results show that: brand association of smart phones really have significant influences on purchase intention. Reference groups will have a regulatory role on the relationship between independent variable and dependent variable. And when taking different levels of the reference groups as moderator, its moderating effects would change according to the different dimensions of brand association. Firstly, compared to non-members of reference groups, members of reference groups play a positive regulatory effect in the relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variables: Specifically,members of reference groups play a positive regulator effect in the relationship between social identity association and personal recognition association of smart phones and purchase intention, while have no apparent moderating effect between quality assurance, status,enterprise association regarding smart phones and purchase intention. Secondly, non-members of reference groups exists no significant moderating effect between independent variable and dependent variable: non-members of reference groups don’t moderate the relationship between the quality assurance, personal recognition, business association of smart phones andpurchase intention significantly. Aspiration reference groups play a positive regulatory impact on the relationship between smart phones’ social identity, status association and purchase willingness. Dissociative reference groups negatively regulates the relationship between smart phones’ social identity, status association and purchase intention.