The Post-Purchase Impact of Brand Image
Abstract
Economic theory confirmed by empirical work states that customers' value perceptions result from their perceptions of overall quality and price competitiveness (Gale & Buzzell, 1987; Gale, 1994; Chang & Wildt, 1994). Since these initial works, several researchers (Morritt, 1999; Rust, Zeithaml & Lemon, 2000) have proposed extensions to the basic model to include constructs such as customer satisfaction and brand image. This research takes a hard look at the effect of brand image on customers' post-purchase perceptions of the value of products or services that they've purchased. Work to date suggests that when measured post purchase, the construct of brand is redundant with the construct of overall quality. In other words, after customers make their purchase (decision), their perceptions of quality eclipse brand image. Data from telephone surveys of purchase decision-makers captured their perceptions of value and their ratings of various brands. The survey captured brand ratings for the vendor that a business actually used in 342 cases. The assessment of the effect of brand on overall quality will be conducted using a competing models strategy. Specifically, the basic model (Kordupleski, Rust & Zahorik, 1993) will be estimated. Then the brand construct will be added and its impact evaluated via an incremental F-test. Since no incremental contribution is expected, the redundancy of the constructs of brand and overall quality will be examined using the Partial Least Squares approach proposed by Chin (in Marcoulides, 1998). Because there is no a priori reason for deleting multivariate outliers, the analysis will be performed two ways, with and without multivariate outliers, simply to test the stability of the solutions.
