Branding plays a vital role in determining the purchasing behavior of the customers across the world and each and every customer has a specific list of reasons to choose or not to choose a particular brand. Most of the brands focus on their marketing strategies to attract a particular customer based always and leaves an impression on the consumer’s side. In simple words branding can be defined as the strategies followed by a company to attract the target customers through different means of marketing techniques like ads and logos and try to maintain a great and long lasting relationship with the customers all the time.
In general customers maintain a good relation with a particular brand always and they always notify the product with the well known logos. Branding has a great influence of the purchasing behavior of the customers and there is lot of research done in this area. If a famous brand comes up with a new or upgraded version of their product, they need to focus on many aspects to take the product to the customers and follows different strategies to market the product and in most of the cases; they are successful in using their brand value rather than other marketing strategies. The main aim of this project is to investigate and critically review the impact of changes in brand positioning on the consumer purchasing behavior. Following are the aims and objectives of this project
Aim: To investigate and critically review the impact of brand positing and changes to the current brand positioning on the purchasing behavior of the customers against different products.
Objectives
Following are the research objectives
- To understand the importance of brand positioning and different strategies followed by the companies for their brand positioning.
- To analyze the customer purchasing behavior towards the changes in brand positioning followed by different companies
- To evaluate the impact of brand positioning on the overall business value of the organization.
Hypothesis
- Brand positioning has direct impact on the customer purchasing behavior
- Changes in brand positioning has no significance in attracting the customers
Literature Review
Customer behavior towards branding is always an important research area to be focused and many research scholars have explained the concept of customer behavior in different aspects. Customer behavior can be broadly categorized in to two different types like cognitive and experience oriented. Cognitive behavior of the customers always leads the customers to choose a particular product in terms of rationalism and logic and they don’t have any particular relation to any product. Experienced behavior of the customers always has an emotional attitude to a particular product and always chooses the product irrespective of the new arrivals. Most of the customers come under the category of emotional behavior attitude and they always have an emotional bond to an age old product and never try to choose any other good quality or better product. Their preferences are fixed towards a particular product and always purchase the same product until unless the quality of the product is degraded. Rational behavior of the customers makes them to choose a product based on the requirements and always think what the market actually offers for a particular product.
Once they get the enough knowledge on the market and the product, the actual choice to purchase or not is made across them. Learned behaviors of the customers make them to choose a product as a habit and test them and fix to a particular product and this type of attitude can be observed with the customers while choosing a newspaper. Social behavior of the customers make them to choose a particular product based on the social environment they are living and always depends on the opinion of other people while choosing a product. In most of the cases, the purchasing behavior of the customers depends on the cultural environment from which they are brought up and even there are many other factors that influence the attitude of the customers to choose a particular product always and few of them are as listed below
- Cultural factors refers to the actual culture of the customers from which they are originated and their regular habits
- Social factors refers to the social group a particular customer belong to and choice of the product made by that particular group always
- Personal factors like age and personal interest of the customers towards a particular product. Personal attributes of the customers like profession, lifestyle and status of the customer are the driving factors towards this attitude.
- Psychological factors like beliefs, motivation and perception make the customers to choose a particular product.
Thus there are different driving factors that make the customers to develop their attitude towards choosing a particular brand always across their purchase. According to , the decision process in choosing a brand for a product by a customer has different steps like recognizing the need, search for the required information, evaluating the results, decision towards a particular product and post purchase behavior. All these steps are really common in most of the customers and the market search plays a vital role in decision of a particular brand for a particular product.
The decision process holds five key steps and in most of the cases, all these steps are not followed by the customers and that too during the purchase of daily commodities, where the customers skip the search information and evaluation phase in general. These five stages are passed by a customer when they are making the purchase for the first time and if they successfully pass the five steps and even satisfied with the post purchase attitude, the corresponding customer develops a positive corner towards a particular brand and try to be in the same corner always.
Involvement of the customer during the purchase period also plays a vital in deciding the brand and in most of the cases, the level of involvement shown by the customers when buying a big product is not shown in case of smaller ones. Customers can be categorized based on their choice when buying a new product for the first time and few customers always like to take an experiments and rest of the customers follow the decision of the first category customers .
Estimating the buying behavior of the customers of a particular country is really tedious job and cross culture issues also play a vital role in deciding the internal buying behavior of the customers. Thus there are different factors that decide the buying behavior of the customers and the impact of branding on the purchasing behavior of the customers. Both these two terms are interrelated and many theories are proposed towards this concept.
Research Methodology
Qualitative research methodology is used to do this research and a case study based approach is used to gather the required information. Semi structured interviews are used primary source of data and the opinion gathered from different respondent like customers and store managers in the research process is used to analyze the research hypothesis. Few customers are selected from the two supermarkets in London to gather the required information. A research sample size of around 5 to 6 customers is chosen in this project and the opinion from them is used as the primary source of information. Secondary source of information is also used in this research and mainly gathered from different published articles, books, journals and websites as given the source section of this proposal.