Determining the Value of Brand Origin and Brand Image Investment for High End Luxury Brands

In today’s market place, a large number of brands use strong brand origin cues in their promotions campaigns. This is highly prevalent when it comes to luxury brands including behemoths like LVMH and Gucci to specialist luxury players like Patek Phillipe and Bremont, which highlight their brand origin in each and every promotion. For example, specialist luxury watch maker Baume & Mercier highlights its brand origin inside their logo itself. Researchers suggest that in markets for example luxury fashions and accessories, a specific country of origin or foreign image generally may carry a prestige connotation. It’s also been observed that luxury brands spend a disproportionate level of their overall financial budget on brand image building.

When looking at the country-of-origin literature, it’s possible to note that the majority of the country-of- origin literature has emphasized origin effects at the product level rather than brand level. Professor Keller opines that brand related cues behave as an important competitive advantage aspect for luxury brands. Moreover, researchers have progressively required measuring the impact of brand name origin and brand image on purchase intentions. In one of my earlier papers, I discovered that due to the highly social nature of luxury consumption, consumers make an effort to gain social advantage by using the desired group’s consumption pattern. Concentrating on different facets of the independent self, it can be theorized that consumers will demonstrate fitting in behaviour by using brands which match the look with the group they wish to belong to. Furthermore, scientific study has emphasized that brand related cues may give a key to a greater understanding of luxury consumption. Thus, if consumers use branding cues to produce a sense of belonging, it would seem logical to review how such branding cues may influence customer purchase decision.

In recent years, the issue of luxury consumption has brought a lot of interest among marketing scholars. However, little is known about how exactly to optimize and control consumer expectations using management controlled factors for instance brand origin and brand image.

To discover an answer towards the issue of how management controlled factors can be used to optimize consumer expectations, we completed research emphasizing following two questions:

1. What will be the effect of branding cues (i.e. brand origin and brand image) on purchase intentions?

2. Is the impact similar across developing and emerging markets?

The answer to the issue one will help researchers and managers in knowing whether the wide range of money luxury brands devote to brand image is worth it or otherwise not. Similarly, the answer to question two highlights what type of standardization and adaptation is required when promoting luxury brands in various markets.

Using this goal at heart, we studied consumers from your UK and India employing a structured quantitative survey.

Prior scientific studies concentrating on regularly consumed products have found a greater influence of brand name origin on collectivist consumers. However, contradicting results were noticed in the context of luxury purchase intentions. The research results claim that consumers in individualist developed market rely more on brand origin cues than consumers in collectivist, developing markets. This is often caused by the nature of the market and competition. British consumers have come across the entire process of globalization for a longer period than their Indian counterparts. While the elite within the Indian market were as aware and consuming global luxury brands as their developed country counterparts, the masses were not. Furthermore, global luxury brands entered several developing markets including India in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For example, LVMH entered India by way of a partnership in 2003, and Armani found its way to India only in mid-2007. The longer exposure with the masses to global luxury products, availability of more brands, and greater competition make British consumers increasingly conscious of the brand origin cues associated with the luxury products or brands. Therefore, to differentiate themselves, British consumers use stronger brand origin cues than Indian consumers who only recently have been exposed to global luxury brands within their home markets.

The finding relating to brand image is worth attention. The research findings revealed that brand image does not influence consumer purchase intentions directly nonetheless it significantly moderates the connection between normative interpersonal influences and luxury purchase intentions in both countries. This finding gives empirical support for the theorized argument submitted earlier regarding gelling behaviour and the impact of brand name image. The study implies that people display higher self-brand connection if the brand image is in conjunction with the image of the social group they need to keep company with. Brand image seemed to be found to be a disciplined moderator for the relationship between informational interpersonal influences and luxury purchase intentions. However, it was only significant in the context of the UK. This result corroborates the sooner result regarding the utilization of strong brand cues on the list of British consumers. It once more stresses the importance of brand building.

Managers vying for acceptance of the luxury brands in developed markets like the UK should concentrate on having a strategy that stresses the brand origin prominently. The findings highlight the fascinating contrasts in buyer behavior across nations. Indian consumers are highly dedicated to social acceptability and look for other views of reality to suit in. On the other hand, British consumers associate with a favorable brand origin to fit in. Luxury brand managers have to be conscious of consumers’ limited awareness and knowledge of luxury brands in developing markets (as a result of less exposure). As a result, it may be required to go for significant co-branding and joint ventures such markets to accomplish a greater prominence of these brands in consumers’ minds which often will build strong loyalty and equity in these markets.

Overall, the results also highlight an original contextual association of luxury. Previous researchers observed the significance of brand origin and image when it comes to Indian consumers’ consumption decisions for regularly purchase products, however, contradicting findings of this study claim that luxury like a context is fairly unique. Therefore, managers should approach generalized findings relating to regularly purchased products with caution when it comes to it in the context of luxury consumption.