Does Emotional Appeal Work in Advertising? The Rationality Behind Using Emotional Appeal to Create Favorable Brand Attitude

--Tapan K Panda, Tapas K Panda and Kamalesh Mishra

The paper attempts to assimilate the current thinking on the use of emotional appeals in advertising, positioning and communication in order to build a favorable attitude towards a brand. It elucidates the areas where emotional appeals would work best, while pointing out the possible pitfalls in employing such a strategy across the board. Further, an attempt has been made to interpret the current body of knowledge on the subject and create a context for general application of emotional appeal in advertising. The paper identifies products and services for which emotional advertising appeals will be more suitable. It also elaborates the risk involved in using emotional appeals. Factors influencing effectiveness of emotional appeals are discussed in detail and guidelines are drawn for effective use of emotional appeals. The authors have suggested future direction of research in the area of use of advertising appeal and its influence on brand attitude formation.

© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Measuring Customer-Based Brand Equity Through Brand Building Blocks for Durables

--Rinalini P Kakati and Smritishikha Choudhury

This study evaluates global and Indian brands in the Consumer Durables Sector by using Customer-Based Brand Equity Model (Keller, 2001). Six brand building blocks, as referred by Keller (2001), were considered in the study—Brand Salience, Brand Imagery, Brand Performance, Brand Judgment, Brand Feelings and Brand Resonance. The findings reveal that global brand’s brand strength is much higher than the Indian brand’s. The Indian brand has scored significantly less in ‘Brand Preference’ and consequently its ‘Brand Strength’ has been much lesser than that of the global brand. Two other hypotheses were also tested regarding the existence of positive relationship between brand trust and brand affect and attitudinal loyalty and purchase loyalty. The need to test these hypotheses arise because of the importance of the last brand building block, ‘Brand Resonance’, to marketing managers, as high brand resonance implies high loyalty. The empirical findings show that there exists a positive relationship between brand trust and brand affect and attitudinal and purchase loyalty for both global and Indian brand.

© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Building Private Labels into Strong Brands

--K R Senthilvelkumar and P David Jawahar

Private labels are great assets for retail firms, as they help attract customers, build loyalty and generate large sales margins. Though private labels have evolved worldwide from being cheap substitutes for manufacturers’ brands to strong contenders for them over the years, their role in the Indian market at present is limited. Many Indian retail firms have launched their private labels, but several of them have not been very successful. Based on the perception on private labels and intention to buy private labels, an empirical research conducted by the authors among consumers in Coimbatore, who purchased from modern retail outlets, revealed that the buyers of private labels could be classified into three and two clusters respectively. The respondents’ age and income did not influence their perception and intention, but their gender did. Based on the findings, this paper aims at exploring the approaches possible for retail firms to develop their private labels into strong brands.

© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

The Effect of Repositioning on Brand Personality: An Empirical Study on BlackBerry Mobile Phones

--Mukesh Kumar Mishra and Dibyendu Choudhury

This study focuses on measuring the brand personality of BlackBerry mobile phone to find out the changes in brand image after repositioning and targeting youth, and exploring the model validity of Jennifer Aaker’s Brand Personality Scale. The random sampling method was used to collect primary data from different management and engineering colleges of twin cities of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack in India. 695 surveys were conducted, of which 601 respondents had responded and only 417 had filled the questionnaire properly. To perform exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, the sample was divided into two equal parts by randomly selecting about 50% of cases using the filtering algorithm in SPSS (Roy and Vaibhav, 2010). Sample 1 had 209 respondents and sample 2 had 208 respondents. Next, an exploratory factor analysis was performed (on sample 1) on the 38 items of brand personality using the principal component analysis with Varimax rotation. The major findings were: sophistication is the most important brand personality dimension of BlackBerry, followed by excitement and ruggedness. Sincerity and competence are not important brand personality dimensions. In sophistication, upper-class is the most important item, followed by charming, smooth and glamorous. In excitement, up-to-date is the most important item, followed by independent, imaginative, exciting and cool. In ruggedness, outdoorsy is the most important item, followed by tough, Western and masculine. So, the company should project sophistication as an important brand personality dimension rather than competence after repositioning the brand while targeting Indian youth.

© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.