Abstract:
Brands are important assets to a company, making it essential that managers understand their brands. More importantly, managers must understand how their customers view the company's brands. Without this understanding managers run the risk of making erroneous decisions that may lessen the value of a company's brand. While there has been much research into brand management an area that has been somewhat neglected is the area of brand roles. Indeed, there has been very little exploration into what may influence the role of a brand for a customer. Consumer behaviour and brand role literature suggests that the involvement construct influences customers in many different ways and has the potential to influence brand roles. Therefore, the aim of this research was to investigate the relationship between involvement and brand roles. In order to achieve this the specific conceptualisations of both the involvement construct and the brand roles constructs were explored and the chosen conceptualisations were justified. The conceptualisation of involvement chosen was cognitively based and was referred to as 'enduring involvement' in this research. The various brand roles were integrated and as per the literature ordered in an evolutionary fashion from functional brand roles to symbolic brand roles. This construct was referred to as the level of symbolism in the brand role. A strong conceptual argument was then developed linking the two constructs and hypotheses were formed.
It was hypothesised that the greater the enduring involvement the greater the level of symbolism in the brand role. Additionally, it was hypothesised that the dimensions of enduring involvement would also positively influence the level of symbolism in the brand role. Measures were developed from the literature and quantitative research was undertaken in order to test these hypotheses. A mail survey utilising a number of different brands was conducted and 131 usable responses were received. The hypotheses were then tested using regression analysis. The results indicated support for the hypotheses in all but one of the brands tested. The theoretical and managerial implications of this research were discussed including the influence of involvement on brand strategy. Lastly, limitations of this research and future research directions were examined.
