Manufacturer and Retailer Brand Acceptance under Different Levels of Purchase Involvement
Manufacturer and Retailer Brand Acceptance under Different Levels of Purchase Involvement

Summary/Abstract: Consumers usually care who is standing behind the brand – a well-known manufacturer, or retailer, whose store is being visited, or an anonymous producer. Branding type in terms of implied brand ownership plays an important informational role. However, some consumers are more likely to prefer one brand type over the other. Marketing scholars and practitioners are interested in factors that differentiate such consumers and their choices. Lithuanian retailer brands skipped the extensive period of price fighting, as was the case with many retail brands in advanced markets in Europe. This is one of the reasons to believe that the perceptual gap between retailer and manufacturer brands in Lithuania might be even narrower than that in countries with longer market history. Thus, the general question of how consumers differentiate one type brand from another in markets like Lithuania is of special interest. Extensive scholarly research up to date (e.g., Laurent, Kapferer, 1985; Zaichkowsky, 1985; Mittal, 1989; Donovan, Jalleh, 1999; Worrington, Shim, 2000; Knox, Walker, 2003; Hynes Lo, 2006; Howard, Kerin, 2006) demonstrated that the extent to which consumers utilize available brand-related information depends on their involvement with purchase decision. In this paper, we are interested how purchase decision involvement affects the degree to which consumer differentiate – or don’t differentiate – between manufacturer and retailer brands. For measuring the levels of consumer purchase decision involvement, we choose to use modified purchase decision involvement scale by Mittal (1995). The empirical study of baby diaper category is carried with Lithuanian consumers using multiple factor full-concept (or full-profile) conjoint analysis. Our results demonstrate that consumers with differing purchase involvement levels differ in their relative valuation of manufacturer and retailer brands in the same category. Namely, at lower levels of purchase decision involvement, brand type signals become more important. We find other interesting differences between the low- and high- involvement groups. For example, extra category-specific benefit (“extra dry security” for baby diapers) is significantly higher valued by low-involvement group. This is in line with the Elaboration Likelihood Theory – in that low-involvement consumers are taking the peripheral processing route, and give more weight to simple, non numerical inferences or cues, thus engaging in context-driven processing.

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