Based on the above conceptual model various hypotheses have been developed that evaluates the impact of customers’ prior product knowledge, persuasiveness of online reviews have on their purchase intentions, consumer based brand equity and attitudes toward the perfume brands in a specific market.
In an effort to give a better insight of the variables that are going to be used in the survey, a brief definition of each variable will be provided.
Dependent variables are specified as follows:
- Purchase intentions: It measures the degree to which a consumer means to buy, or at least try, a specified brand in the future. -Consumer based brand equity: It measures the enhancement in the perceived utility and desirability …show more content…
Specifically, brand awareness and brand associations are being affected by the prior product knowledge that a consumer has about a particular brand, while the perceived quality and loyalty has not been confirmed to be affected.
H3. Greater prior product knowledge will positively influence the consumer brand equity.
4.1.4 Persuasiveness of online reviewsAttitude
Fourth hypothesis is between POR and ATT. To be more precise, positive online reviews are enhancing the attitudes toward a brand and negative online reviews are diminishing the attitude towards a brand. Additionally, the same study showed that extremely positive and extremely negative reviews are resulting differently, in terms of influence, towards a brand. Extremely negative reviews have higher influence than extremely positive reviews on attitudes towards the brand.
H4. Persuasiveness of online reviewspositively influences Attitude.
4.1.5 AttitudePurchase intention
Fifth hypothesis is between ATT and PI. When a consumer is receiving positive attribute specific product information to his/hers predisposition towards the product then his/hers final judgment will be positive and he/she will be able to adopt the information provided and alter his/her predisposition towards the …show more content…
Measurements of prior product knowledge, persuasiveness of online reviews, consumer based brand equity, attitude towards the brand and purchase intentions were made.
5.4 Data analysis procedure
Data analysis procedure includes following activities such as data entry of responses, datascreening and selecting proper data for the data analysis strategy (Sekaran, 2003). To find out data entry errors, data screening was performed, which includes (data cleaning, screening the data, reliability analysis, validity tests, descriptive data and test of response bias). SPSS v21 was used to do all the tests. In the end Structural equation modeling (SEM) AMOS v21was used to analysis data and hypothesis testing.
5.2 Data cleaning
The questionnaire was distributed via to the respondents of various age groups. Out of the 250 participants that filled in and submitted the questionnaire, 238 respondents have been certified as valid for the data analysis. The 12 respondents have been excluded from the data analysis for the following reasons: 8 participants have never used perfume, 4 participants entered the data incompletely with missing values for some