Exploring dimensions associated with prestige brands and their impact on consumers

Abstract

Different product categories have different motivations. These indicate that consumers’ needs are functional, emotional or symbolic in nature, and brands can be positioned to satisfy either of these types of needs or a group of them. This existing literature covers these aspects in a broad manner but several questions seemed to be still unanswered. E.g. Are these functional or symbolic brand concepts adequately distinguished in consumers’ minds? If so, how can one distinguish these brand concepts? Are functionality, hedonism and symbolism the orthogonal concepts or parts of some continuum? Can the brands act on one of these dimensions or exhibit traits of one or more simultaneously. This report tries to answer these questions by taking three common prestige brands Tropicana, Oreo and Café Coffee Day in consideration. These brands as per current understanding are positioned as Functional, Hedonic (indulgence) and Symbolic respectively. This report explores the level of functionality, hedonism and symbolism in their brand images by capturing consumer responses. More than 90% of the respondents are the students of IIM Bangalore PGP program belonging to varied demographic and behavioral profiles. A 5-point Likert Scale is used to capture the responses where respondents specify their level of agreement or disagreement on a symmetric agree-disagree scale for a series of statements. The results are obtained, averaged into categories and one way ANOVA conducted to compare across the 3 brands. The results show that there is no significant difference across the 3 categories of packaged juice, cream biscuits and coffee cafés for price quality relationship. For prestige sensitivity, there is a significant difference across the respondents for the 3 categories in consideration. Respondents are more prestige sensitive for coffee cafes as compared to packaged juices or cream biscuits. Looking at the functional dimension, it was seen that the functional dimension is not significantly different across the 3 brands. This means that the respondents don’t see much difference between levels of functionality across the 3 brands. The experiential dimension came significantly different across the 3 brands. This means that the respondents see the brands differently on the experiential dimension. On the symbolic dimension front, it was seen that this dimension was significantly different across the 3 brands. This means that the respondents see the brands differently on the symbolic dimension. This report then ends with the interpretation of the analysis and usage of the concepts of Prestige-seeking consumer behavior (Vigneron, Franck and Johnson, Lester 1999) and combination of public-private consumption and luxury-necessity dimensions (William O. Bearden, Michael J. Etzel 1982) to come up with recommendations for the 3 brands under consideration. It is thus proposed that Café Coffee Day needs to work on its symbolic dimension which is currently weakening and build its score there. Oreo should remain focused towards the experiential/emotional aspect of the brand with established standards for the functional aspect too. Without the functional aspect, the emotional aspect won’t work. Tropicana should supplement its functional positioning with experiential dimensions. Shifting it towards Hedonism will ensure that people buy Tropicana brand because they want to. Else they will buy just any available brand of up market juice